Can Gov. Andrew Cuomo take a break from his televised mock victory lap, put his head together with Mayor Bill de Blasio, and figure out how to open schools statewide full-time in September?
We hear a lot about “privilege” and how we have to “verify” ours. But there is no one more privileged than wealthy politicians, with adult children and an incredible amount of power to decide who can and who cannot work, planning to open a part-time school for the fall.
Recently, the city’s Department of Education sent a “Back to School Survey” to parents, asking them to rate the safety precautions they would like schools to take. The key question: “If we need to start school next year by combining in-person learning at school and learning at home to follow the health and safety guidelines, rank the scheduling options below as the most preferred (1) to the least preferred (3) “.
Response options included alternating weeks of learning at school and online, sending children to school on certain days of the week, and only online. No full-time in-person option was provided.
How are parents supposed to work full time while their children are in school part time? Who takes them to and from school only on certain days, and who is with them the rest of the time? “Let the babysitter do it,” says the unspoken dictation. If you don’t have a babysitter or other childcare aid, that’s your problem.
Schools are realizing that they wouldn’t even have enough space to implement the plan half online and half in person.
As Selim Algar reported for The Post this month, a principal at PS 107 in Brooklyn has already raised the alarm that given the size of her school, current social distancing protocols would force her to divide her student body into three sections, each one Cohort that attends in person every three weeks.
School Chancellor Richard Carranza confirmed that reality and added: “I think it will require that we all be very flexible.” How reassuring.
Parents whose jobs are restarted wonder how they can be so flexible in the world. Indeed, officials compel them to choose between their jobs and livelihoods and any hopes of learning and development progress for their children.
The worst part: The state and the city insist on this, even when death and hospitalization rates continue to drop in New York, and even when we know that children are at minuscule risk for COVID-19; the death rate for those who get it is equally minuscule.
There are other dangers in the world that threaten children much more seriously, but we do not keep them locked inside. That’s why the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a “strong” statement last week urging that “all policy considerations for the upcoming school year begin with the goal of having students physically present at school.”
But what about the adults who work at the school, goes the counter argument. Don’t they matter? Children are not “very effective spreaders” of the disease, according to scientists. Also, will adults not yet be exposed to 100 percent of children, as well as others, under the 50/50 plan?
This summer is already a disaster for many parents. Many day camps around the city did not open. Governor Cuomo’s reopening directive came too late for them to open during the summer or found the strict guidelines too burdensome.
The governor’s arbitrary decisions regarding other matters radiate uncertainty and chaos. Last week, it announced that, after all, many companies in Phase Four will not be able to open. Inexplicably, shopping malls, cinemas, and gyms are denied the opportunity to demonstrate that they can safely open. The fear among parents is that schools, also in Phase Four, will share the same fate.
New York is not the only place that lives with COVID-19. Connecticut and Massachusetts schools have announced they will reopen entirely in the fall. Denmark, Israel, Austria, Norway, Australia and New Zealand have reopened all schools. The British government announced last week that it will open schools and remove any plans for children to socially withdraw.
We should be sane and follow their example. Instead, we’re stuck with a governor who likes to be an emergency executive on television, and he seems to have gotten the wrong idea about our state’s nickname. The Empire State does not, in fact, have an emperor-elect.
Twitter: @Karol
.
