NYC Schools to Close as Virus Rate Reaches 3% Trigger Point

New York City shut down in-person schooling as the citywide test infection rate for Covid-19 hit 3%, forcing parents of hundreds of thousands of kids to find alternative child-care arrangements or adjust their work schedules.

Schools will be closed as of tomorrow “out of an abundance of caution,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday on Twitter.

De Blasio agreed with parents and teachers months ago to set the 3% rate that forces a temporary halt to the largest U.S. school system’s blended program of classroom and remote instruction. The move forces almost 300,000 students who had been participating to join the rest of the city’s 1.1 million public-school students in all-online instruction at home.

“It’s crazy. We’re looking at Plans B through Z, because my husband and I both must work outside the home, and I have three weeks left of reduced paid leave,” said Kanika Ingram, a Verizon field technician whose husband is a U.S. Postal Service manager.

The announcement came amid confusion among public officials. De Blasio, initially scheduled to give a 10 a.m. virus briefing, postponed it until 11:30 p.m; more than three hours later, he rescheduled it for 3 p.m. In the meantime, Governor Andrew Cuomo held his own virus briefing, where he announced that New York City’s latest average positivity rate was 2.5%.

Cuomo also noted that a 3% rate would put New York City in a state-designated orange zone that would have to shut indoor dining, gyms and other “high-risk,” nonessential businesses. It was unclear if de Blasio’s announcement on Twitter, which came as a surprise to Cuomo, means the additional restrictions mentioned by Cuomo would be made.

Working Mom

The schools shutdown begins days after the deadline for parents’ one chance to switch their children from all-remote to the blended program. Educators say face-to-face learning is more effective than at-home instruction, especially for the younger and special needs students. Tens of thousands remain without mobile devices and adequate broadband service, a problem school officials say may not be fixed until later in the school year.

Ingram, the working mom, said her two youngest children repeatedly get knocked off their internet connections on days when they stay with their grandmother receiving remote instruction, she said. Her older son, who just started high school, stays home where the internet is better on remote days, but hasn’t yet been assigned an English or social studies teacher. “It’s a struggle,” she said.

The order doesn’t apply to the city’s private schools, some of which have been offering in-class instruction to their youngest learners.

City health and school officials said the decision to shut down in-class instruction was made out of caution even though the virus has been absent from most classrooms, and the infection rate from conducting tens of thousands of random tests in city schools has remained below 1%.

Safety Questions

City officials lack enough information to safely modify rules established in August that set the 3% threshold, Jay Varma, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s senior public health adviser, said Friday in an interview. As the virus spreads through the city, officials don’t know whether schools could remain safe havens from the illness, he said.

“As there is more community transmission, there are more infections in people associated with schools — students, teachers, other employees,” Varma said. “It doesn’t mean that the school itself is the place where they got infected. But because of the rigor of our protocol, it obligates us to close classrooms and buildings.”

New York City, the early center of the initial Covid-19 outbreak, was reporting more than 5,000 cases a day at the peak in April. By August, it had controlled the spread to fewer than 300 daily cases. A recent nationwide resurgence associated with the colder weather has brought that number back up, to a seven-day average of 926 as of Nov. 12.

“We must fight back a second wave to keep our schools open,” de Blasio said Nov. 14 on Twitter.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has the authority to stop schools from shutting, said he wouldn’t interfere with a 3% threshold that was agreed upon by city officials, parents and teachers. At the same time, he urged them to consider amending their plan to factor in the schools’ infection rates as well as the city’s.

“If the school is not spreading the virus or if the school has a much lower positivity rate than the surrounding area, then the school is not part of the problem,” Cuomo said Nov. 14. “You could argue that keeping the children in the school is part of the solution, rather than the children spending time on the street in the neighborhood where the infection rate is higher.”

Closing the schools “has ancillary consequences that people don’t often think about,” the governor said. “You close the schools, you make it much harder for parents to go to work. Now they have to worry about who’s going to take care of the children.”

Before Covid-19 struck, New York City’s unemployment rate was 3.4%. It touched a high of 20.3% in June. By September, it had partly recovered to 14.1%.

Jasmine Gripper, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, a coalition of parent advocacy groups, said the city may have taken on too much of a challenge and should have given in-class priority to its most vulnerable students — the young, those with special needs and the poor.

“No one’s been getting high quality in-person learning, and some teachers of online classes haven’t seen their students’ faces since school started,” she said.

At the private Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, School Head Bill Donohue told parents in an email: “We will maintain our independence in decision making while also recognizing that we must watch this evolving situation carefully.” Of the mayor’s decision, Donohue said, “The reasoning is not completely clear, but it appears that he is considering this bold action step for a short-term closure as a way to stem the increase in overall positivity rates in the city.” Younger students have proved to be “not significant spreaders,” Donohue said.

While the order doesn’t apply to private schools, parents at the Nightingale School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side received an alert that their children may be required to stay home. “We are preparing for the possibility that we might need to transition to remote learning at some point,” said Lower School Head Rebecca Urciuoli. “While we are not yet at that point, we have decided that we will send children home with large bags containing many of their school supplies,” she said.

Schools across the U.S. have been open for weeks, and so far relatively few appear to have spread Covid-19 among students or into wider communities. So far, the schools’ experience suggests that children are not major spreaders of the virus among each other, their families and others, as had been initially feared. Instead, they are more likely accurate reflections of conditions in the broader community.

“You can’t really pull the school out from the community,” said Walter Gilliam, an education policy researcher at the Yale School of Medicine. “If the transmission rates are too high, there’s just almost nothing they could do to keep it from getting into schools.”

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, who represents the city’s more than 90,000 public school staff, said the 3% threshold was established “to make sure that schools did not become centers to spread the coronavirus.” He called on New Yorkers to observe social distancing rules, wearing masks and other steps to “lower the infection rate so school buildings can re-open.”

Protocols established in August before the schools opened required classrooms be closed when a student or teacher is found to be infected, and whole school buildings could be shut upon evidence of more widespread infection.

The 3% standard is part of the schools’ multiple lines of defense including masks physical distancing and hygiene. Officials don’t have enough information to know which rule could be scrapped or modified without risking a crisis, Varma said.

“Our standard of evidence has to be higher than a guess,” he said. “We can’t say for sure that if we remove one part of this protocol that we can absolutely guarantee everything as safe.”

— With assistance by Amanda L Gordon, and Kristen V Brown

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