One day after New York City public schools reopened with widespread absences, Mayor Eric Adams lashed out at criticism of his decision to keep kids in classrooms despite an alarming surge in coronavirus infections and hospitalizations.
He also argued that the city’s Black and brown students could not afford the “luxury” of learning remotely — but a Gothamist analysis suggests those students are staying home in greater numbers than their white counterparts.
“We cannot feed into the hysteria,” Adams said Tuesday during an appearance on CNN. “This is traumatizing for our children.”
The battle over how to handle schools amid an increase in coronavirus cases, driven largely by the omicron variant, marks the first major test for the new mayor who was elected in part on a promise to bring more equity to city services. Like his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, Adams has aggressively pushed back on the assertion that the city’s nearly 1 million public school children would be safer engaging in remote learning for a period of time
But the latest variant has sent cases soaring. In the last week for which data is available, an average of 34,000 New Yorkers tested positive for COVID-19 each day. The city hit a single-day record of more than 52,000 new cases on December 27th, although that count likely includes cases caught over the Christmas holiday.
On Monday, the education department reported the attendance rate for all city students as being around 67%, only slightly higher than the lowest point of the school year when only 65% of students showed up on the day before winter break. By Tuesday, the attendance rate rose to 72%, with roughly 260,000 out.
The day prior, the head of the city’s teachers union, Michael Mulgrew, said that in-person learning may not be sustainable in light of the number of school staff members who were out due to COVID.
If we had a snowstorm we would have shifted to remote. What we have now isn’t a snowstorm; it’s a wildfire.
According to DOE data released Tuesday, over the past 11 days principals reported an average of around 1,200 cases a day among students and staff. That’s more than quadruple the average daily case count a month prior. Education officials emphasized that the dramatic increase was in part due to a policy shift in which the DOE began accepting at-home rapid tests. Previously it only counted results that were confirmed in labs.
Adams maintained that he and Mulgrew were in “lockstep” coordination over the effort to keep schools safe and bristled at the suggestion that the two were in conflict over managing schools.
Meanwhile, administrators said they continued to scramble to staff classrooms. Some principals said they were managing by combining classes, splitting up special education co-teachers, and using paraprofessionals and guidance counselors to cover classes. Others called in substitutes or workers from the education department’s central and district offices. Many had students working on computers in class with teachers who were zooming in from home — and teachers who were in class were unsure how much new material to cover for so few students, school personnel said.
The city has pledged to double the amount of testing at schools as well as distribute at-home test kits and higher-quality masks. Although de Blasio said the city would step up its testing program, only 35% of students have completed the paperwork needed to participate in onsite testing, according to the education department.
Absentee Rates At Schools
“It is a luxury to say ‘stay at home,’ when you have all the tools that you need,” Adams added during his Tuesday CNN appearance. “But for poor, Black, brown children that don't have access to some of the basic things, school is the best place for you.”
But even as the mayor argued that low-income Black and brown students needed to be in school for critical services, Monday’s data suggested that attendance was lower among that cohort compared to white students. Gothamist's analysis found that in schools where no more than one-tenth of students are white, attendance was about 61% on average—10 percentage points lower than the average for schools with whiter student bodies. The gap narrowed to 8 percentage points on Tuesday.
It is not clear whether daily attendance at mostly non-white schools tends to be lower on average, and time will tell if low attendance continues. However, Black and brown parents last year were more likely than their white counterparts to keep their children home for remote learning when it was available as a choice.
The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a question about this week's attendance.
Black and Hispanic New Yorkers have borne the brunt of severe illness and death from the virus since the pandemic began; their hospitalization rates are nearly twice those of white New Yorkers. The poorest neighborhoods have also suffered disproportionately from COVID-19, with residents dying at more than twice the rate seen in wealthier parts of the city.
Less than half of school-aged children in New York City are fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Black children have the lowest full vaccination rate of any racial or ethnic group tracked in the city’s data.
Donna Baugham-Perry, a Black mother of two in Brooklyn, told Gothamist/WNYC she agrees with the decision to keep schools open, calling it crucial for the many low-income families of color in her community who are unable to work remotely.
“One of the things that I have learned through this entire experience is that remote learning has become a privilege of those who are privileged,” she said.
But Tazin Azad, a mom of three in Brooklyn who is South Asian, said she was offended by Adams’ comments on Tuesday.
“Hysteria indicates a lack of agency over someone’s own actions or thought process,” she said. “Across the board, Black and brown families have decided when we feel safe sending our kids to school, and when we don’t feel safe sending our kids to school, we keep them home.”
She later added: “If we had a snowstorm we would have shifted to remote. What we have now isn’t a snowstorm; it’s a wildfire.”
Azad said she kept her kids home the week before the winter break because of the sharp increase in cases at their schools. This week she’s keeping her youngest home because the kindergartener is not fully vaccinated yet.
A Push For More Testing
Several elected officials have called on the city to significantly ramp up testing by requiring students who do not want to be tested to opt out as opposed to asking them to fill out forms to opt in.
“It's pretty simple,” said Brad Lander, the city’s new comptroller. “If you require people to fill out a form to get tested, fewer people are going to.”
Lander said distributing take-home tests before the holidays — as other U.S. school districts, like Boston, did — would have given parents the necessary confidence they needed to send their children back to school.
Mark Levine, the newly elected Manhattan borough president, who became a self-styled “COVID recovery czar” as a city councilmember, argued for even more testing, saying that all staff and students should be tested on a weekly basis. The DOE has said it is testing 20% of students each week, double the amount it was prior to the winter break.
“It requires a devotion of resources, and there's a lot of logistics to work out and lab capacity to secure,” Levine acknowledged. “But to me that is the standard we should meet.”
Both Levine and Lander said they supported the mayor’s decision to keep schools open.
Outside the Thurgood Marshall Academy Lower School in Harlem — a school whose attendance rate was 54.5% on Tuesday — parents sought to keep schools open in spite of the surge.
Diego, a Latino parent of a fourth grader who declined to give his last name, said his job as a construction worker leaves him with few options to help with remote learning. He wakes up at 5 a.m. to head out the door at 6 a.m., only leaving him time to pick up his son at the end of the school day.
Chris, a Black parent on his way to work who did not give his last name, said school should remain open for in-person instruction. His daughter jumped in to say she is happy remaining at school, calling the remote learning too difficult to log onto.
“I don’t like it,” said the girl before leaving.
