New York City schools will be closed for at least the next four-plus weeks due to the Coronavirus outbreak, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Sunday evening.
De Blasio said at a media briefing there would be no school until April 20, and perhaps for the rest of the academic year.
There are currently 329 cases, including five deaths, due to the virus in New York City, the mayor confirmed.
De Blasio said trying to keep the schools open any longer had become a futile effort.
“I believe the facts, unfortunately, have given us no other choice,” de Blasio said. “But there are three things that we are trying to protect. Most importantly our public health system, our hospital system, our clinics, everywhere that people go for health care, and two things that feed that system are public transit system, and, of course, our schools.
“Now that we will not have our normal school schedule, kids in our normal school buildings, we are going to come up with a number of alternatives to try to, as much as possible, provide our kids with an education remotely and to provide a physical location for the children of those crucial public workers — those health care workers, transit workers, first responders. Those locations will be in various places around the five boroughs. We hope between the remote learning and the specialized sites for the children of essential workers that we can keep enough going to support our health care system, but it will not be easy,” de Blasio added.
De Blasio said remote learning will begin on Monday, March 23. The Department of Education has been working on a system for the last few weeks.
“It has never been attempted by the city of New York on this scale, to say the least,” de Blasio said. “But they have been working on a wartime footing to prepare it. It will be up and running for children in grades K-12 on Monday, March 23, in a week. It is a system that will improve with each week. And it will certainly take time to make it as strong as it could be and needs to be.”
The mayor went on to say teachers will begin to get trained on teaching remotely over the next few days. The United Federation aid in a release, in part, “School staff will all stay home on Monday. At this moment, the staff will then report to work on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday to prepare instructional plans for remote learning for their students during this interval.”
“Again, this is going to be a kind of battlefield training. These are not ideal conditions. We’ll have to teach these teachers quickly,” de Blasio said. “This is a point where I can say to all our educators: We need you. We need you. These children need you. These families need you. For so many of our educators it will be an opportunity to take the tools of your profession and use them in a new way, to reach a lot of kids who are going to be dealing with really, really tough circumstances.”