New York City Schools Again Postpone Start Of In-Person Learning For Most Students
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- New York City public schools are once again postponing the start of in-person learning, the mayor announced Thursday.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said 3-K, pre-K and District 75 special education schools will still reopen Monday.
However, K-5 and K-8 schools will stay remote until Sept. 29. Middle and high schools won't reopen until Oct. 1.
WATCH: Mayor De Blasio On Delaying Schools Again
Students will continue to learn remotely in the meantime.
The additional delay comes a day after CBS2 highlighted a Lower East Side school with broken windows that was previously approved for learning, teachers in the Bronx preparing to teach outside, and cries from teachers city wide about thermometers that don't work, and the lack of personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies.
De Blasio said the decision came following an hours-long conversation with the principal and teacher unions.
"Yesterday morning, they reached out to me and they said they had real concerns about specific things that had to be done to make sure our schools could start effectively, start safely," the mayor said. "Although they acknowledged that some real progress has been made, not enough had been made and more had to be done to make sure that things would be as strong as they needed to be."
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The mayor said the main concern that still needs to be addressed is staffing.
"I heard an honest concern, and it just was clear to me that we did not have a clear enough number," he said.
He said the city will deploy another 2,500 teachers -- in addition to 2,000 that were promised earlier this week.
Some will come from the Department of Education and the substitute teacher pool. CUNY will also help identify students pursing education degrees, as well as adjunct professors.
"You can't just put any teacher in any situation and expect them to behave professionally and that seems to be the misguided notion coming out of City Hall," CUNY education professor David Bloomfield said.
United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said the city is now on top of ventilation issues plaguing schools and there's been a major improvement in the rollout of coronavirus testing.
"Getting the right PPE in the right school settings is something that should be basically worked out by the beginning of next week," he added. "So it's really been constant monitoring and listening."
The city's blended learning model was supposed to start on Sept. 10, but in-person classes were already pushed to Sept. 21.
"There's no way you came up with a plan in a couple of days that you couldn't get in five months. For five months we've been asking what are you gonna do?" parent Brigette Brantley told CBS2's Dick Brennan.
State Sen. John Liu said the delays are a failure of management.
"It's just one delay after another and this has gotta stop," Liu said. "There are millions of people who have to schedule their lives around this. The mayor every morning projects an air of confidence, as if everything is on track, but clearly things are not on track."
Pulling off remote learning with little notice will also come with challenges.
On Wednesday night, CBS2's Jessica Layton spoke exclusively with a Bay Ridge mother whose 10-year-old daughter's first day of remote learning on Google meets was hacked with pornography.
Rozner asked the mayor and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza how that could happen.
"I'm troubled by that. I'm sure every parent would be troubled by that," de Blasio said. "I'm very sorry that happened."
"We have no evidence at this point that it's an external hack. It's more of somebody internally, within that school, that decided to not play by the rules, so it's being investigated," Carranza added.
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