New York to phase out virtual schooling, milestone for final reopening

New York City will stop offering the virtual schooling option or remotely from the fall, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Monday, an important step towards the total reopening of the country’s largest school system.

This school year, most of the city’s 1 million students – some 600,000 – stayed home for lessons. When the new school year begins on September 13, all students and school staff return to school buildings full timesaid de Blasio.

“This is going to be crucial for the families”, de Blasio said at a press conference. “A lot of parents are relieved, I know.”

New York was one of the first major cities in the United States to completely eliminate the distance learning option for the next school year. But widespread predictions that online courses are a must for school districts may be premature. New Jersey Governor Philip D. Murphy announced last week that the state would cease offering distance education starting in the fall, after the governors of Connecticut and Massachusetts made similar announcements.

New York’s decision will facilitate restore the school system to its pre-pandemic status, because students and teachers will no longer share their activity between home and school buildings.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Teachers’ Federation, expressed his support for the mayor’s announcement in a statement, saying teachers’ union The city wanted “as many students as possible to return to school in the safest way possible.” However, he acknowledged that “a small number of students with extreme medical conditions” might find it difficult to return to face-to-face teaching as the pandemic still remains a threat, and said that a remote option might be necessary for these children.

De Blasio stressed that the school system would implement “abundant protections” at the start of the school year. But his announcement will undoubtedly alarm some parents who remain concerned about the sending of their children to school buildings, even as the pandemic eases in the United States.

More families in favor

Recent interviews with parents in the city revealed that while many families wish to return to normal schooling, some are reluctant to return to class.

Non-white families, whose health has been disproportionately affected by the virus, were the most likely to see their children continue to learn at home over the past year.

At the mayor’s press conference, the city’s school principal Meisha Porter said there would be “no housing related to Covid,” indicating that teachers and school staff they will no longer receive medical exemptions for working from home.

The city’s school system today plans to require masks in school buildings, Porter said. Schools will also follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social distancing protocol, which currently recommends that elementary students stay at least three feet apart in classrooms. Both policies could change in the fall.

New York, like the districts of the country, has known difficulties for distance learning to be successful. Online courses have been frustrating for many students and even disastrous for others, such as children with disabilities.

According to one estimate, three million students across the United States, roughly the school-age population of Florida, they stopped taking courses, virtual or face-to-face, after the start of the pandemic. A disproportionate number of these disengaged students are low-income Black, Latino, and Native American children who have struggled to keep up in partially or totally remote classrooms.

De Blasio, who has been criticized for not taking additional steps to improve the quality of virtual education, said that distance learning is inherently inferior.

It has also been extremely complex for the city to manage two parallel school systems, one face to face and the other virtual, with many students switching from one system to the other every few days. The fact that so many students and teachers work in an artisanal way almost impossible that some schools offered regular hours.

In recent months, de Blasio has said he hopes the city will maintain some sort of distance learning option for the fall. But he and his associates have changed their minds in recent weeks, officials said, as the number of viruses plummeted in the city and children 12 and older were allowed to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Pfizer and BioNTech plan to present in September Vaccine authorization requests for children 2 to 11 years old.

“The data has been incredibly clear,” de Blasio explained on Monday. “The vaccination worked sooner than expected; it had even more impact than we thought.”

Eliza Shapiro and Michael Gold. The New York Times