Most kids not in five-day, in-person classes

Students are returning to city schools that had been shut by the pandemic — but slowly.

Less than one-third of schools open for in-person learning offer five days a week of face-to-face classes for all their students — though almost all offer full-time in-person instruction to at least some kids, Mayor de Blasio said Wednesday.

“We said last month — in December — that we wanted to transform our schools as much as possible to five-day-a-week instruction,” de Blasio said.

“Almost every one of our 878 schools now is offering some amount of five-day-a-week instruction,” the mayor said. “In some cases ,it’s all the kids all the time, and other cases, it’s a majority of the kids.”

“Some schools, because of space and other reasons, they can’t yet do a majority, but they’re prioritizing kids in greatest need — kids who live in shelters, for example, or kids with special needs.”

Nearly 250 schools are offering full-time in-person classes to all kids, while about 860 are offering five days a week of face-to-face classes to a portion of their students, officials say.

Since the system partially reopened in December, the city is pushing schools to switch from a hybrid model where students alternate between in-person and online classes to a fully in-person schedule.

But the logistics of the switch are complicated — with schools facing strict class size limits because of social-distancing requirements, and many short on in-person staff because of medical accommodations.

Still, de Blasio noted the 247 schools currently offering five days a week to all students “would constitute alone the eighth-largest school district in America.”

“We want to keep building that out,” he added. “As more and more of our teachers and staff get vaccinated, that’s going to open up a world of possibility.”