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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio predicted on Monday that the city’s public schools will remain closed for the remainder of the school year despite being scheduled to reopen next month. “I can’t see it,” de Blasio remarked to PIX11 Morning News about schools reopening before the summer. “I do unfortunately believe the likelihood right …
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio predicted on Monday that the city’s public schools will remain closed for the remainder of the school year despite being scheduled to reopen next month.
“I can’t see it,” de Blasio remarked to PIX11 Morning News about schools reopening before the summer. “I do unfortunately believe the likelihood right now is that we lose the whole school year.”
De Blasio closed the city’s more than 1,700 schools, which serve 1.1 million students, starting on Monday of last week and said the city would make a first attempt to reopen them on April 20.
“It’s going to be very difficult for a lot of families,” the mayor said when announcing his decision, which came after he resisted calls to close the schools over concerns that doing so would leave essential workers with no option but to stay home with their children.
“I know right now there are so many parents who do not necessarily have any other place for their children. There are so many parents who depend on our schools for meals for their children. There are so many public servants we depend on, our first responders, transit workers, health care workers, who need their kids to be in school,” de Blasio said.
Critics also expressed concern that many of New York City’s school children depend on their schools for food, and remote learning is impossible for the many students who do not have internet at home.
De Blasio also said that he has no plans to close city streets as part of the city’s efforts to encourage New Yorkers to practice social distancing, a step Governor Andrew Cuomo suggested. Cuomo also ordered the city over the weekend to come up with a plan for enforcing restrictions on gathering in public places, which the mayor said he will do by the Monday deadline.
New York City has about a third of all coronavirus cases in the country. As of Monday morning, New York state had more than 16,000 cases of the deadly respiratory illness and at least 150 deaths.
