SCHOOLS’ SCARY ‘NEW NORMAL’
Teachers wary as they head back for first day of planning
City teachers took their first wary steps back toward inperson schooling Tuesday, returning to buildings many haven’t set foot in since March.
For many, it was a bizarre experience — embracing familiar classrooms and colleagues with new rules and scores of unanswered questions.
“Everyone I spoke to was really calm, cool, collected, but it’s just a lot of disorientation going on,” said Pedro Dones, a math teacher at Middle School 363 in the Bronx. “People are in different rooms. They are asking people to teach subjects they’ve never taught before.”
Hanging over the first day back for more than 60,000 educators teaching in person this year were lingering safety questions. Officials released the results of a hotly anticipated school ventilation survey Monday, and shut down 10 buildings for additional repairs as a result.
Those include Harvest Collegiate High School in Union Square, where teachers were informed on Monday their building would be temporarily shuttered.
John McCrann, a math teacher at the school, got the news as he was getting ready for a Labor Day barbecue.
“I checked it [my phone] and had about 2,000 text messages,” McCrann said.
School leaders don’t yet know when the repairs will be done, but Education Department officials said they’ll find an alternative space for students and teachers if the building isn’t safe by Sept. 21 — which could hinder an already daunting planning process.
“If we’re put in another building, what would that look like for people’s commutes, for students figuring out where to go?” McCrann wondered.
In other schools that remained open, some teachers questioned the city’s metrics for assessing ventilation — pointing to windows that barely crack or faulty air vents.
According to the city inspections, roughly 2,900 individual classrooms — or about 5% of the more than 60,000 total — need ventilation upgrades. More than 13,000 bathrooms, almost 60% of all city school rest rooms, weren’t up to snuff.
During a Tuesday morning news conference in lower Manhattan, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew defended the ventilation inspection process, which he said the union collaborated on.
“I understand the anxiety and fear so many people are facing,” he said. “The decisions are based on science and doctors, not elected officials and bureaucrats.”
Educators also had to navigate new rules around mask wearing and social distancing — and hit some bumps along the way. One Bronx middle school staffer described a staff meeting with roughly 90 people in the same auditorium with no option to participate remotely from separate classrooms.
“If teachers are having trouble and not modeling the perfect behavior, how can we expect kids to do it?” the staffer added.
On top of the safety concerns, many teachers got a glimpse Tuesday of how their schools are attempting to staff the complex blended model that alternates some students between in-person and remote learning, and keeps others entirely virtual. For some, teaching as they know it will be upended.
Dones, the middle-school math teacher in the Bronx, learned he’ll also be taking on science, English language arts and social studies so that he can remain in a pod with the same group of students.
“I feel personally that I’ll be OK,” he said. “But am I going to sit here and tell you I can produce an expert teaching environment? I don’t know if I can.”
It feels especially difficult to pour his energy and time into planning for in-person learning knowing that, if virus cases spike, the school could be forced back into all-remote learning.
“I’m really worried about the kids coming back, adapting to this new normal … and potentially getting sent home,” he said.
“Teachers by nature are planners, that’s what we do,” he said. “And now you’re in a situation where you don’t really know what you’re planning for.”