Schools shut only after at least 4 cases

City schools will no longer shut down when two COVID-19 cases crop up in the same week, one of several changes that city officials announced Thursday to reduce the “disruptive” closures that have outraged students, parents and teachers.

Individual classrooms will still close and quarantine when a positive COVID case is reported. But the entire school will no longer close when two or more unrelated cases are reported within the same week.

Instead, weekly testing will ramp up from 20% of kids and staff to 40% of kids and staff when two or three cases are reported.

If four or more cases crop up within the same week, in at least four separate classrooms, and contact tracers determine that the virus was transmitted in schools, then the entire school will shut down for 10 days.

The change comes on the heels of months of escalating protest against the previous rule, which required schools to temporarily close when two or more cases cropped up in separate classrooms in the same week, and contact tracers couldn’t figure out how the cases were transmitted.

That rule — along with rising community spread last winter — contributed to a rash of temporary school shutdowns that many parents, students and teachers said undermined the stability of in-person learning.

“What this change allows us to do is end the era of disruptive, 24-hour closures,” said Jay Varma, Mayor de Blasio’s senior health adviser.

The new rules will also treat separately individual schools that share a building. Under the two-case rule, every school in a building had to shut down if two or more cases cropped up in any of the co-located schools. Now, schools will only shut down if the cases come from their students or staffers.

Schools also previously had to temporarily shut down for 24 hours while contact tracers did their investigations. Now they’ll only have to shut down after the investigations are complete.

The city teachers union staunchly opposed changing the two-case rule for months, arguing that it had helped prevent outbreaks in city schools.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew blasted the mayor earlier this week for announcing an end to the old rule without a new one, and argued that the city needed approval from Albany to make the change.

State Health Department officials said they did not need to approve a change to the two-case rule.