Back-to-class joy!
City middle school students, staff reunited
Roughly 60,000 New York City middle school students headed back to in-person classes Thursday for the first time since November, eagerly coming faceto-face with their teachers after months of remote learning.
“We were really happy to be reunited with our students and colleagues,” said Nina Kulkarni, an eighth-grade math teacher at McKinley Junior High School in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
“The kids really were just grateful to be there and happy to be out of their homes and around other people,” said Danielle Cowan, another McKinley teacher.
City junior high schools opened for part-time in-person classes in September, but shut down along with the rest of the school system in November when the citywide COVID test positivity rate hit 3%.
Since then, officials have reopened preschools, elementary schools and District 75 schools for students with complex disabilities with ramped-up COVID testing, but said they needed additional time to build up testing capacity for middle schools.
Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza touted the safety protocols Thursday morning, citing a .58% positivity rate from surveillance testing in schools.
“We can truly say the safest indoor locations in the City of New York are in the classrooms of the New York City Department of Education,” said Carranza. “We’ve ramped up capacity by hiring additional staff to support our situation room and adding teams to conduct weekly testing in our middle and elementary schools.”
Even though COVID rates are far higher now across the city than last fall when schools first reopened, some teachers said they felt less wary about returning to class Thursday because they already had practice.
“We knew what we were getting into this time around,” said Kulkarni.
Safety protocols weren’t the only challenge. Some teachers had to simultaneously instruct a small cohort of students in person and a larger group online.
Kulkarni and Cowan, who co-teach eighth-grade math classes with a mix of general and special education students, traded off focusing on the in-person and remote groups.
“For teachers who do not have a co-teacher, my heart goes out to them,” Kulkarni said.
Officials said an estimated 62,000 middle school students are signed up for in-person classes. Last year, there were roughly 240,000 middle school students citywide.
At McKinley, about 600 of the school’s 1,800 students were expected to return in person. Those 600 students are broken up into three evenly-sized cohorts, who attend school on alternating days to reduce crowding in the building and ensure physical distance.
City officials have pushed schools to allow at least their most vulnerable students to attend five days a week of in-person classes, but space and staffing limitations have complicated that effort.
Officials said earlier this month that half of the 471 middle schools opening this week were offering five days a week to a portion of their students.
Roughly 16,000 staff also returned to middle school buildings Thursday. Those staffers were eligible for priority access to COVID vaccines at city-run testing sites last week.