NYC’s school reopening experiment

Barring a timely outbreak of common sense, New York is about to embark on a perilous, ill-advised attempt to partially open the public schools in September. New York will be nearly alone among big-city school districts in trying to re-open school buildings en masse.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, announced in mid-July that it will require its 600,000 students to stay home and attend classes remotely this fall. The Chicago Public Schools, which serves 355,000 children, recently followed suit.

The schools in San Diego, Atlanta, Nashville and Oakland will be onlineonly. Miami, Houston and San Francisco will start the school year using an online-only model, then consider reopening buildings after a few weeks.

But New York stands alone in announcing a complicated, “blended” approach. Families can choose 100% online learning, but most of the city’s 1.1 million kids are expected to attend classes in person two or three days per week and use online learning for the balance of time.

Mayor de Blasio says the buildings will be sanitized regularly to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“We’re talking about constant cleaning of school, social distancing constantly in schools without exception. The classrooms are going to be distanced, face coverings for everyone in the school — you know, all sorts of things, hand washing stations and hand sanitizer stations,” The mayor told me. “This is a very elaborate structure. It’s been put together with nonstop input from the unions involved, and it will keep evolving over the next five weeks and improving. So, I feel like we’re where we need to be to get ready for opening day.”

The biggest flaw in the plan is the disruption that will follow when (not if ) students, teachers or staff members test positive for coronavirus. Under de Blasio’s plan, as few as two confirmed cases of COVID-19 can result in the shutdown of an entire school building for 14 days, during which everyone linked to the site is expected to self-quarantine and shift to 100% online learning while the building gets cleaned and investigators trace contacts.

In a system of 1.1 million students, it’s a near certainty that hundreds of parents, students, faculty and staff — perhaps thousands — will be abruptly sent home for distance learning at least once under this plan. On Twitter, one group of teachers called the plan “confusing and absolutely frightening.”

De Blasio, of course, sees it differently.

“I don’t think you’re going to see the number of cases all hitting at once,” he told me. “Some schools might have one at a time, some schools may have a couple. If they even do and they have to shut down, it’s for a limited period of time and we have the remote [learning] as a fallback. So, there’ll be some off-and-on realities in the beginning in some schools.”

That, too, is going to get complicated. The city isn’t planning to test all students, teachers and staff for the virus, so it’s unclear when and how we’ll discover when positive cases occur, including cases when a carrier of the virus isn’t displaying symptoms.

We also face the coming of the so-called “regular” flu virus, which tends to arrive in October and causes fever, coughing and other symptoms that resemble the effects of COVID-19. We’re likely to see a lot of false alarms.

The time and effort being expended on opening school buildings — many of which could end up closing — might better be spent radically beefing up the number and range of broadband connections for students, since even the cheapest internet plans cost $15 a month and may be out of range for low-income families.

In short, New York might have been better off doing what other big cities are doing: planning for a few ugly, unavoidable months of 100% online learning as we wait for a vaccine to free us from the scourge of the modern plague.

Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.