What Will the First Day of School Look Like?

Photo: Bobby Doherty In late June, while public-school students across the city were attending their graduation or “step-up” ceremonies over Zoom, the NYC Department of Education, as part of its planning for school reopening in the fall, asked every principal in the system to measure their buildings. Armed with floor plans and laser pointers, the principals visited each classroom, noted which ones had windows, and figured out if any other spaces could be converted into classrooms.

“It was sad,” she says. It was sad to see her classroom, set up for lively group discussions, rendered unusable. It was sad to imagine her students having to cling to the edges of the hallway as they pass one another. But Ford was also angry. A lot of time had passed since March, and almost nothing had been done to prepare the school to reopen. It seemed unthinkable that it could now be done in time.

According to Michael Mulgrew, a former high-school English teacher from Staten Island and now head of the powerful United Federation of Teachers, the union started planning for the fall in the first weeks of April. Mulgrew says the planning committee looked at all sorts of options: “Any plan you can think of, we discussed.” The committee’s members looked at outdoor learning but concluded that, by the end of October, the weather would be too cold and wet.

The next morning, Mulgrew had a contentious meeting with Mayor de Blasio. He urged the mayor to close the schools, but de Blasio resisted. “Then he did that press conference,” Mulgrew says. De Blasio brandished a letter from a big health-care-workers union arguing that schools needed to stay open so its members could take care of the sick. “Which is rich,” Mulgrew says, “because by Sunday, that same union was saying they didn’t support that position.

Worse, from the parental perspective, limiting in-person classes to 12 students would mean that a fairly typical New York City classroom of 30 kids would have to be split into three cohorts, not two. The principal of P.S. 107, a popular school in Park Slope that appears in Mo Willems’s book Knuffle Bunny Too, sent a letter to parents after doing the DOE-mandated walk-through of her building and measuring the classrooms.

Ennis is from Texas, and though she has been in New York for over a decade, she still talks with a slight drawl. She acknowledges how much it would help to be able to drop the kids off at school this fall. “It would be nice to have them out of my hair and have the house to myself,” she says. “I wouldn’t have to lock myself in my room as much.

keithgessen Nope Fuck outta here

keithgessen Follow ⊂_ヽ ＼＼ AND ＼( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ⌒ヽ / へ＼ / / ＼＼ I ﾚ ノ ヽ_つ / / / /| ( (ヽ | |、＼FOLLOW | 丿 ＼ ⌒) | | ) / ノ ) Lﾉ BACK (_／

keithgessen Hazmat suits for school... Halloween in September... lol

keithgessen If we would have totally locked down and closed borders in March for a month we would be like New Zealand now.

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