Kids In New York City Go Back To School For In-Person Classes

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A mother accompanies her children as they arrive for the first day of in-person classes at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood.

Mark Lennihan/AP

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Mark Lennihan/AP

The Coronavirus Crisis
New York City Educators Warn School Reopening Plan Is ‘Missing Pieces’

They objected to a staffing agreement between the city and the teacher union, in which the city agreed to not require the same teachers to teach both fully remote and in-person students simultaneously, contributing to a last-minute shortage of thousands of teachers.

Aside from concerns about teaching and learning, coronavirus clusters have recently been appearing in numerous New York City zip codes. The city has said that in-person schooling will shut down if the 7-day rolling average positivity rate on tests — the percentage of all New Yorkers getting coronavirus tests who test positive — goes above 3% for the entire city; but some teachers have voiced concerns about returning to school buildings in districts where the average is higher than that right now.

New York, once the epicenter of the pandemic, is rare among large cities in reaching levels of community spread low enough to be considered safe by experts to return to school. Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the country, announced this week that in-person classes will not begin before November 1 or later.

Shots — Health News
How Safe Is Your School’s Reopening Plan? Here’s What To Look For

In Miami-Dade county, home of the nation’s fourth-largest school district, the school board voted to begin a staggered return to school this coming Monday. Others districts, in places like Chicago and Las Vegas, are remaining remote for now. While there is continuing scientific debate over the role of younger and older children in spreading the coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics both reported recently that children, particularly older children and teens, make up a rising proportion of cases.