Keep it classy, DeB!
Parents & kids hit City Hall to demand hybrid for all
A group of parents and children rallied outside City Hall on Sunday to demand a return to hybrid learning for all grades — the day before only K-5 students were set to head back into classrooms.
Joining a recent wave of protests across the country calling for more in-class instruction, the approximately 70 parents and kids waved signs with messages such as, “Safest place for children is in school,” and “Home detention is not education.”
“Spring was really tough,’’ said protester Suzanne Nossel, who has a 16year-old son and 13-year-old daughter in city public schools.
Nossel and others at the rally said the city needs to reopen its middle and high schools to hybrid learning again for the kids’ sake.
“Having the interaction with the teachers, the social opportunities — it’s such a critical age in terms of development,” the mom said.
Nossel’s daughter, Liza Greenberg, an eighth-grader at MS 243 on the Upper West Side, agreed.
“I [was] doing remote school since March, and we recently went back to hybrid, and it was so great to see my friends and actually have the human contact that is so important at my age,” she said.
“When school went back remote [in November], I know a lot of my friends have been struggling with mental-health issues, depression, eating disorders, and it’s going to continue unless we actually take action.”
Hybrid instruction in city schools began in late September, only to shut down amid a spike in COVID-19 cases in early November.
Ten days after closing buildings back down, Mayor de Blasio announced he was reopening the lower grades to partial in-person learning again, as federal and local health officials reported that schools’ coronavirus rates were far lower than their communities’ and that younger students appear less vulnerable to the virus.
Still, hybrid learning in the lower grades is open only to the 195,000 children whose parents had already signed them up for the blend of virtual and in-person instruction. The kids must also have consent forms signed by their parents for the Department of Education’s mandatory, random, weekly coronavirus testing.
A showdown was looming between school officials and parents who refuse to let their kids be tested without them present — with some moms and dads vowing to usher their children into buildings without the forms Monday.
Mia Eisner-Grynberg, 38, whose husband teaches in the upper grades in the city, was among those at Sunday’s City Hall protest.
“Watching what my husband has been experiencing at his [Grade] 6-to-12 school at the time when [students] were in school, I can tell you 100 percent those kids who were coming into the building were the kids who need to be in school,” she told The Post.
Mayoral spokeswoman Avery Cohen told The Post via e-mail Sunday, “Mayor de Blasio is the only big-city mayor in the country who has been able to open schools successfully. Thousands of children will be in classrooms this week, and we’re working to get our middle and high schoolers back as quickly as possible.”