Well, they did it. Mayor Bill de Blasio and his schools Chancellor Richard Carranza have finally confirmed an absurd plan to have school restart on a part-time schedule in the fall. What will parents who still have to work full-time do? Who cares! What will teachers who have school-age children do? That’s their problem. The new “Let them eat cake” is “Hire a nanny.”
The mayor treated this announcement as some sort of reflection of what parents wanted. “75% of families want to send their kids back to school in the fall,” he tweeted. The survey sent to parents had three options and none of them was “Reopen schools full-time.” The mayor had to know a majority of parents would have picked that.
Because everything to Hizzoner is about President Trump, de Blasio added, “What we WON’T do is ignore the science and recklessly charge ahead like our president. We will do it the right way. We will keep everyone safe.”
There is, of course, absolutely no way to “keep everyone safe” and, as the mayor who ignored the COVID-19 epidemic until the last possible second, even famously going to the gym the day after he was forced to close schools, de Blasio knows this.
The most galling part is when these politicians pretend they are making their decisions based on facts or science. But study after study shows that kids rarely contract coronavirus. Children rarely spread coronavirus. Children very, very rarely die of coronavirus.
Are they protecting adults? Teachers will still be exposed to 100 percent of kids as well as each other under blended learning. There is absolutely no “science” where this makes sense.
There is no medical difference between sending kids to school three days per week or five. This is the worst example of splitting the baby. Part-time school will only make things more difficult for parents, teachers and — remember them? — kids.
Everyone else is managing to open schools. Look at Europe, where many countries had far more deaths per total population than the United States, and are still opening schools because they know education for children is paramount and they know online classes do not provide an adequate education.
We don’t even need to look across the ocean. How about just looking across the Long Island Sound? Connecticut plans to reopen schools in September, full-time, no-nonsense. The Hartford Courant reported last week that “16,000 New Yorkers have left the state for suburban Connecticut since March, according to new data from the U.S. Postal Service.” This is not a coincidence. Anyone who can get out will and the rest of us will be stuck with an already failing school system that doesn’t work for anybody.
The same people who designed our abysmal online education system during the lockdown are responsible for this foolish plan. A story in these pages last week highlighted an irate mom of a Brooklyn Tech student telling the story of six of his seven teachers skipping live instruction. If one of New York’s finest high schools can’t get it right, who can?
A mother of twin first-graders, at one of the “best” elementary schools in New York City, told me their teacher did not do a single live instruction during the entire lockdown period. Do we really believe that teacher will spring into action when she’s responsible for both in-person AND online education?
It’s like New York is in an invisible competition to see how quickly we can destroy every aspect of our city. We’re winning!