Lack of staff, supplies delays school classes
New York City’s ambitious attempt to be among the first big cities to bring students back into classrooms suffered another setback Thursday, as the mayor announced he was delaying the start of in-person instruction for most students due to a shortage of staff and supplies.
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new timeline that will keep most elementary school students out of physical classrooms until at least Sept. 29. Middle and high school students will learn remotely through at least Oct. 1.
“We are doing this to make sure all of the standards we set can be achieved,” de Blasio said.
The latest delay came just days before students across the nation’s largest school district were set to resume in-person instruction Monday. Now, only pre-kindergarten students and some other special education students will be going back into physical classrooms next week.
United Federation of Teachers
President Michael Mulgrew said it wouldn’t have been safe to open all the school sites next week.
“If we are going to do this, we must make sure that we get this right,” he said. “We want our school systems up, running and safe and we want to keep it up running and safe, because that’s what the families, the children of this city deserve.”
The administration says it has already acted, or made progress, on most issues flagged.
Harvard professor David Grabowski, a commission member, said “there’s a sense of ‘mission accomplished’ ” and “that’s just not the case.”
“We were charged with providing a road map out of the crisis,” Grabowski said. “We weren’t asked to evaluate the ... response or provide any kind of valuation as to how they have handled the pandemic.”
Among the top recommendations in the 186-page report:
• Establish a national testing strategy.
• Guarantee supplies of PPE, or personal protective equipment.
• Safely resume family visits.
• Help more with infection control.
In remarks Wednesday night at an event hosted by Hillsdale College, Barr had called the lockdown orders the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history” since slavery.
His comments, at a Northern Virginia event hosted by the school, also criticized his own prosecutors for behaving as “headhunters” in their pursuit of prominent targets and for using the weight of the criminal justice system to launch what he said were “ill-conceived” political probes.
Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., the No. 3 House Democratic leader, told CNN that Barr’s remarks were “the most ridiculous, tone-deaf, God-awful things I’ve ever heard” because they wrongly equated human bondage with a measure aimed at saving lives.
“Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives,” Clyburn said. “This pandemic is a threat to human life.”