The pressure has come from elected officials like the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, who on Friday called on the city to temporarily close it schools. “It is not time to panic,” he wrote on Twitter. “But it is time to act.” It has come from Michael Mulgrew, the president of the city’s teachers’ union, who on Friday afternoon called on de Blasio to close the schools.
It has come from public health experts; three dozen infectious disease experts in New York signed a letter Thursday calling on the mayor to close all schools.
And it has come from the collective actions of other school leaders: On Friday, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn said that its Catholic elementary schools in Brooklyn and Queens will be closed next week, affecting more than 41,000 students at 228 elementary schools. Hours earlier, Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter school network, announced it would close its schools to its 18,000 students and transition to online learning.
Yet the vast majority of the city’s 1,800 public schools are still up and running, and leaders here have insisted that they will remain open as long as possible.
“We are going to fight tooth and nail to protect our school system,” de Blasio said Thursday, adding, “we are going to do our damnedest to keep the schools open.”
On Friday evening, he doubled down on his pledge to not close schools, despite a significant drop in student attendance.
“We shut down the school system, we might not see it for the rest of the school year, we might not see the beginning of the new school year. And that weighs heavily on me,” he said, noting that experts have found that short-term closures have little impact on flattening the curve of the outbreak.
Addressing his critics, de Blasio said, “This isn’t a popularity contest, this is war.”
Cuomo, who is responsible for schools across the state, including New York City, said Thursday that evidence from other countries was unclear about whether children were carriers of the virus, and said schools would remain open. Still, both leaders have said the city and state were planning for all potential scenarios, including mass closure.
Shutting city schools would likely lead to a broader shutdown of the city, and the decision would be more far-reaching in New York than in any other major U.S. city.
Over 10,000 schools across America — including the urban school districts of Seattle and Washington D.C., along with every school in Michigan, Maryland and Ohio — are shuttered or about to close as the coronavirus spreads rapidly throughout the country. Those schools together educate many millions of children.
But New York’s public school system dwarfs that of any other in the country: With 1.1 million children, it enrolls over 350,000 more students than the second-largest school district, Los Angeles Unified. The city also has a highly vulnerable student population, with about 750,000 students living at or below the poverty line, including roughly 114,000 who are homeless.
While many local private schools and universities have already switched to online learning, that presents its own set of challenges for New York’s public school students, since nearly 1 million households in the city lack internet access. De Blasio has said that the city is preparing some options for remote learning, but that it is not the city’s “preference.”
There are at least 95 confirmed cases in New York City, but only one confirmed case of a city public school student. Public health experts have found so far that children have been less likely than adults to contract the disease, but could still spread it.
“There’s no ideal solution, we are comparing one bad thing with one potentially extraordinarily bad thing,” said Dr. Paul Bieniasz, a virologist and professor at Rockefeller University’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute who was one of the three dozen experts who signed the letter calling on the mayor to close schools.
“The bottom line is that the potential consequences of not closing schools are really too horrible,” he added.
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While there is evidence that school closures helped slow the spread of disease in past pandemics, public health officials have dissenting views about how and whether school closures should be used to combat the coronavirus.
Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said she did not support mass closures in part because districts closing schools seemed to have no clear plan for how to handle the resulting disruption, or even when to reopen their schools.
“I don’t really understand what the endgame here is,” she said, adding that the two-week closures and cleaning days that some schools were adopting seemed arbitrary. “As soon as someone comes in and coughs, it’s not clean anymore.”
Schools would likely have to close for the extent of the epidemic, which could be many months, to be truly effective, she said.
“The public health benefits of closing schools to try to mitigate the impacts of this virus are not clear by any means,” Nuzzo said. “This is largely an experiment.”
Dr. Theodora Hatziioannou, also a virologist and professor at Rockefeller, supports closures, but agreed that they would have to come with clear guidelines in order to be effective. “This doesn’t mean you roam around, it means you stay home.”
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The potential domino effect of mass school closures in New York is staggering.
The mayor said Thursday that the three things the city was most concerned about preserving were its schools, mass transit and health care, which provide essential lifelines for the city’s most vulnerable, in particular, and are tightly linked.
A public hospital nurse, for example, would likely not be able to stay home from work even if her child was home from school. And home health aides who have children enrolled in public schools provide crucial support for elderly New Yorkers, who are particularly vulnerable to the virus.
“The downsides are very well known: We know kids will miss meals, we know parents will have to stay home, including health care workers,” said Mark Levine, a Manhattan city councilman who chairs the council’s health committee. Levine said he had spoken to hospital presidents who have said they are worried about a potential staffing shortage if public schools are shut.
Experts agreed that it would be difficult to shut schools without other severe restrictions on city life, including strong encouragement or even a requirement to keep children at home, rather than simply excusing them from school.
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The vulnerabilities of closings without strict social distancing measures are on display in Scarsdale, a New York City suburb where schools are closed until at least next week after a middle schoolteacher tested positive for the virus.
The district was receiving “reports of students gathering in large numbers and some posting their disregard for the risks associated with the current outbreak,” said Scarsdale’s school superintendent, Thomas Hagerman, in an email to parents Wednesday. “Preventative measures are only effective if we embrace and implement them as a community.”
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Most public schools across the state remain open, with some major exceptions, including public schools in Scarsdale and New Rochelle in Westchester County, which is the epicenter of the state’s outbreak. Initially, only three New Rochelle public schools located in a one-mile “containment” zone closed earlier this week, but the entire district shut down Friday following protests from families.
Inside New York City’s schools this week, educators were concerned and conflicted.
“Thankfully, it’s not my decision,” Liat Olenick, a teacher at the Brooklyn Arbor School in Williamsburg, said of closure. “It’s a really hard one.”
Olenick, who has a compromised immune system and is particularly concerned about the virus, said she endorsed a middle ground between complete closure and business as usual.
That was the recommendation recently made by a group of local doctors and public health workers, who said schools could remain open as “centers for community aid” and “emergency child care” but not for students who receive adequate resources at home.
That option was also supported by several members of the City Council, including the education committee chairman, Mark Treyger. He called on officials to make a few select schools open only to students with medical needs and the children of health care professionals and emergency medical workers.
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“There is an extraordinary amount of fear from families,” said Treyger, who represents parts of Brooklyn.
The vast majority of parents were still sending their children to school, though there was a notable dip in attendance. About 85% of city students attended school Thursday, down from roughly 88% on Wednesday. The average daily attendance rate is nearly 92%.
By Friday morning, however, some school leaders were reporting significant drops in teacher and student attendance, contributing to a sense of growing alarm through schools across the five boroughs.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .