Sept. 13, 2021, the first day of public school in New York City, with every student and teacher attending in person, will be exactly 18 months since March 13, 2020, the last day those same schools were last in session the traditional way — before COVID-19 closed them down and began the dual experiments of remote learning and hybrid school.
Like any experiment, some of it worked fairly well, some of it failed miserably and the balance was inconclusive. But for the sake of more than a million kids, it’s better that we’re going back to the way it always was before. So thank you, Mayor Bill de Blasio, for pulling the plug on this aspect of COVID-19 come fall.
Remote and hybrid instruction will be gone, along with learning pods. What’s staying are masks for everyone and the three-foot rule for safe spacing. Also sticking around will be the Department of Education’s situation room to track any COVID-19 outbreaks in the schools, where the current seven-day positivity rate is almost nil: 0.16%.
Much was lost in the year and a half since COVID-19 forced a radical overhaul of educational routines. Even during this current “return” phase, a 60% majority is still out 100% of the time, and the returnees have a range of five out of five days for little kids down to one out of five for some high schoolers. Multiplied by a million students, the academic, emotional, social and even nutritional cost has been enormous.
Give de Blasio credit for trying earlier and succeeding earlier than elsewhere in the country in getting schools reopened. That was last fall, months before the vaccine. Now that the magic shots are here and easily available, the future is all in-person. We want vaccines for faculty and staff and for students. Once the FDA grants full approval, make them mandatory for everyone, just like measles shots.
Final note: With remote kaput, apparently snow days will be back, unless the DOE wants families to hold on to hundreds of thousands of tablets and laptops that were sent out.
