Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised “holy Hell will rain down” on schools that don’t have enough soap, paper towels or other cleaning supplies to protect students and staff from the potential spread of the COVID-19. “If any school is not ensuring those things are present, they have a problem and we're going to deal with them,” the mayor said on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show on Friday.
The threat of Biblical-level damnation comes amid escalating steps the administration has taken in recent days to ramp up resources and tighten guidelines at schools. (Here’s the latest guidance for parents and teachers.)
The mayor's threat follows criticism by some teachers and parents that the school system has been woefully unprepared for an outbreak.
On Tuesday, multiple teachers told Gothamist/WNYC that they hadn’t gotten any instructions on what to do if they, their colleagues, or their students were symptomatic. They described classrooms full of coughing kids, and concerns about colleagues who were in school despite having traveled to countries with large outbreaks. Many said soap dispensers were empty, and students still weren’t washing their hands before meals.
"How are we preparing? We’re not,” one Bronx teacher said on Tuesday. The teacher asked that their name be withheld for fear of retribution. “There’s nothing that’s changed in our typical operations."
At a press conference Wednesday, de Blasio admitted leaders could have moved faster to put stronger protocols in place for the nation’s largest school system, serving 1.1 million students and employing tens of thousands of adults. Officials say there is not a single case of a student with symptoms so far.
The administration initially issued mixed messages about whether student absences would count toward admission in selective middle and high schools. By midweek officials made a decision: any student absences related to the virus won’t count toward admissions.
Meanwhile, at first, only staff members who traveled to China were advised to stay home for 14 days. Eventually, those who traveled to Iran, Italy, Japan and South Korea were told to do the same. As of Thursday, three teachers who traveled to Italy were in quarantine and getting tested, including the chaperone of a class trip. One of the tests came back negative, two others were pending.
Custodians were instructed to do “deep cleanings” of school buildings twice a week, although it was unclear whether they would be paid overtime for the additional effort. The mayor said new cleaning supplies were being sent to schools.
By the end of the week there was new guidance covering when teachers should refer students to nurses, and how nurses should handle potential cases.
And, in a bit of a bombshell announcement, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza announced that within days there would be a school nurse at every building, some of which house multiple co-located schools. According to statistics from the teachers union, 137 schools out of the system’s 1800 currently don’t have nurses, affecting some 70,000 students. The Department of Education did not say how it would fill those roles so quickly.
But union leaders warned against a band-aid approach. “We don’t have any details of the plan,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which also represents school nurses. “We think every building should have a nurse. A permanent, full time nurse.”
The Bronx teacher who said schools were unprepared earlier this week said the situation changed significantly over the course of the week.
“There has been a lot of additional info going around,” the teacher said. “Custodians disinfecting light switches and doorknobs daily and ensuring soap and paper towels in the bathroom, hand sanitizer ordered (but on back order.)”
Some teachers reported developing new hand-washing songs for students. Others talked about handing out materials to fight bias against people from the most affected countries.
Parents and politicians said several steps the administration was taking to deal with the coronavirus should become permanent policy.
De Blasio said supplies like soap and paper towels should never be an issue. “This is not the 1970s – our school system has the resources to provide every school with towels and soap, and does,” he said. That came as a surprise to parents who routinely fundraise for those supplies, and for teachers who often find soap dispensers empty.
Others called for the new protocol around absences and admissions to become policy, arguing that it shouldn’t take a crisis to put these improvements in place.
