Learning, slowly
After an agonizing wait, Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter have nixed the universally loathed twoCOVID-case closure rule, replacing it with something that makes much more sense. And they announced the new standard just before parents’ Friday deadline for deciding to opt back in to in-person schooling. On both counts, it was the least they could do.
The new edict corrects a hypersensitive trigger cooked up under pressure from the teachers union last summer — one that perplexed public health experts and forced furious parents, kids and staff to endure more than 2,300 sudden extended shutterings, many of them unnecessary.
The updated threshold is four cases within a week, in separate classrooms, provided test-and-trace investigators find that these cases were contracted inside of the school. And only the school in question will close — not the whole campus. That was a no-brainer fix at a time when small, colocated schools are the rule. Disruptive 24-hour full-school shutterings when cases get reported, meant to allow for test-and-trace investigations, are thankfully also gone. And smartly, COVID testing will ramp up from 20% to 40% of a school community after two or three cases get reported.
What won’t change is that individual classrooms reporting a single case will continue to send all their kids home for 10 days. That’s probably unnecessary at a time when the vast majority of educators are vaccinated and when masking, spacing and testing have proven schools to be tough environments for COVID spread.
Nor do we understand why the city didn’t design a sliding scale that takes into effect actual student population. Restaurant capacity is wisely calculated by percentages, not absolutes. Why not this?
If the moms and dads of the 700,000 city kids who’ve currently opted for remote-only instruction are going to choose in-person learning now, not to mention in the fall, they need confidence that schools are both safe and stable. Four is better than two, and sanity better than insanity. We’re getting there.