Hundreds of city teachers, parents, and students marched in Lower Manhattan on Monday afternoon to protest the city’s plan for reopening schools in the fall.
The educators said they thought the plan developed by the city’s Department of Education is not sufficient to protect everyone’s safety, and includes some measures that cannot realistically be carried out.
“I think every single one of us who’s going to be in the school building is going to be extremely anxious,” said Annie Tan, who teaches 5th grade special education in Sunset Park. “I think we all do need in-person education when it’s safe but...to put educators and students and their families in a position where they might bring the COVID-19 virus home and possibly endanger someone else is not something I want for anyone.”
Tan, who declined to say what school she works at, added that multiple students in her class have had family members pass away from COVID-19.
“I’m not letting them go through that again,” Tan said. “It’s not happening.”
The city’s plan would bring public school students back with staggered, rotating schedules that would allow only a fraction of students into a school building at a time, while others learn remotely. Individual families would have the ability to choose whether a child would continue to learn entirely from home, but schools would have to make the option of blended learning available. Teachers over 65 and with medical conditions that put them at greater risk would be able to work from home.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday that the plan will only go forward in September if the infection rate in the city remains below 3 percent, which it has since June (city data shows 1 percent of test results were positive as of July 31st). The city also laid out its plan last week for teachers to get tested ahead of the first day of school and for a school to be shut down if coronavirus cases are found later on.
The UFT faction that organized the march, known as the Movement of Rank and File Educators, or MORE, is demanding that schools remain closed until there have been no new cases in the city for 14 days and rapid testing for coronavirus is available, among other provisions. The group launched a petition against the current plan that garnered 7,235 signatures as of Tuesday morning.
“Our sinks are still broken, our class sizes are too large, our rooms are still poorly ventilated, we still don’t have full-time counselors and nurses in every building and we have seen no evidence that contact tracing and testing for school communities will be adequate,” MORE said in the petition.
'Welcome back to school' sign. Activist educators protest Mayor de Blasio and his plan for the NYC school system opening during the coronavirus pandemic.
The city hasn’t released a plan for testing students and teachers on a regular basis, and it typically takes multiple days to get the results of a test.
In a statement responding to the protest, the city Department of Education said, “We make all decisions while putting health and safety first, and that is why we have a stricter threshold for reopening than the State, which NYC is currently meeting.” Governor Andrew Cuomo has said the infection rate will have to fall below a 5 percent threshold for schools to reopen, rather than 3 percent.
“We’re taking this seriously, and are committing to swift, decisive action in response to public health data and in the interest of school communities,” DOE continued. “We are working side-by-side with our labor partners as we develop details for each piece of the plan to have a safe, healthy return to school this fall.”
MORE has said teachers could stage a sickout if the city’s reopening plan moves ahead, although New York law prohibits public school teachers from striking.
“School buildings should only reopen in the fall — even on a limited basis — if the safety of students, staff and families is assured," UFT President Michael Mulgrew, said in a statement Monday when asked if union leadership supports the teachers protesting against schools reopening in September.
Although Mulgrew helped New York City officials develop the plan for reopening schools, he has started to demand additional safety measures amid growing backlash from teachers. Mulgrew told UFT members in a meeting last month that he thinks in order for it to be safe to reopen city schools in September, additional funding needs to be set aside to hire more school nurses and upgrade air filtration systems in school buildings, the New York Times reported.
“I am preparing to do whatever we need to do if we think the schools are not safe and the city disagrees with us,” Mulgrew said on the call.
Mika Tajima attended the rally with her six-year-old who goes to P.S. 147 in Brooklyn.
Teachers and parents at Monday’s rally said they don’t think the city has the resources to carry out its test-and-trace plan and said the city should instead invest more funding in improving remote learning this semester.
Mika Tajima attended the rally with her six-year-old who goes to P.S. 147 in Brooklyn. Without additional support for remote learning, she said, parents are forced to make the “false choice between a terrible education or sacrificing our health.”
Protesters also said they were concerned that wealthier schools would have an advantage in keeping their communities safe because parents could supplement funding for personal protective equipment and other resources.
“I know that the PTAs on the Upper East Side that collect hundreds and thousands of dollars for their schools are going to be fine,” said Kaliris Salas, the parent of a rising fourth grader at Central Park East 1, an elementary school in East Harlem. “But the schools in our black and brown communities, the schools in East Harlem that have zero money in their PTAs, are going to be left in an even more vulnerable position, perpetuating the cycle of inequities.”
Some teachers at the protest expressed open disdain for remote learning but said teaching in person wasn’t worth the risk.
“There is nothing I love more than teaching music and there is nothing I hate more than teaching music remotely,“ Martín Urbach, a music teacher and restorative justice coordinator at Harvest Collegiate High School in Manhattan, said in a speech at the start of the rally.
“It is the worst possible thing to try and teach music on Zoom. Yet, I am here.”
After rallying in front of the UFT headquarters on Broadway, protesters followed a marching band to Foley Square. Some carried a coffin or body bag, while one group held up a giant neon guillotine with “DOE” written at the top.
Matt Baker, a high school math teacher at the Brooklyn Latin School, marched with a sign memorializing Kimarlee Nguyen, a writer and English teacher at Brooklyn Latin who passed away from coronavirus in April at the age of 33. At the bottom, the sign was imprinted with a hashtag: “#NotOneMoreTeacher.”
Cuomo has emphasized that he has the final say in whether schools reopen, and said he will make a decision this week.
