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‘This inconsistency is not good for anyone’: Frequent school closures take steep toll on NYC families, teachers

The New York Daily News - 2/11/2021

Every day six-year-old son Adrian attends in-person class is a lifeline for the Bronx Kindergartner with autism and his overwhelmed parents.

But those days have become increasingly few and far-between.

Adrian’s school, Samara Community School, has shut down twice for extended stretches in the past two months because of multiple COVID-19 cases, and when it’s open, he can only attend part-time because of staffing and space limitations.

“It’s just crazy,” his mother, Maria Paulino said. School has “been more closed than open.”

The back-and-forth school closures and ongoing childcare challenges eventually got so severe that Paulino’s husband quit his job as a parking attendant to stay home full-time.

“It was hard,” said Paulino, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who works for the federal government. “Now I have to pay everything, but I know it’s for the benefit of my son.”

When city preschools, elementary schools, and District 75 schools for students with complex special needs reopened for in-person classes in early December, city officials promised more stability. With that came five days a week of in-person classes for most students and no more system-wide shutdowns.

But the reality has been far more complicated, parents, staff and administrators claim is undercut by frequent school closures, ongoing staffing challenges and lingering gaps in city childcare networks.

“I do think it’s really beneficial for our kids coming in person,” said Joanna Cohen, an Assistant Principal at P.S. 169 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where the majority of the school’s low-income Asian and Hispanic families have chosen remote learning. “At the same time I think it’s incredibly challenging for the kids and parents to not have any consistency and not know from day to day whether we’ll be closing.”

Health officials maintain schools are safe even as COVID-19 numbers remain high citywide, pointing to fewer cases in schools than in the surrounding community.

But keeping in-person classes open with higher levels of community spread has come with another cost: frequent closures of individual school buildings triggered by reports of two or more COVID-19 cases within a week.

More than 1,000 of those temporary closures — which can last for 10 days or more — have occurred since in-person learning restarted Dec. 7, according to city data.

Several factors have contributed to the rash of shutdowns. As case numbers soared citywide, infection rates ticked up in schools, where test positivity doubled from .28% in December to its current .54%. The the Bronx, that number is at .77%.

More frequent asymptomatic testing in schools has allowed officials to catch more of those cases. Roughly 11,000 of the nearly 15,000 student and staff COVID-19 cases recorded by the city since September have in the past two months, city data shows.

The DOE has also held fast to a rule devised last summer that shutters schools for up to ten days when two or more COVID-19 cases are reported within a week, and contact tracers can’t determine the origin of the cases.

That guideline has come under fire from some parents and health experts who say it’s overly conservative.

“The two case rule was not based on science or evidence and it is doing tremendous harm to the overall well being of children,” said Jennifer Lighter, a pediatric epidemiologist at NYU, who joined parents protesting the rule in January.

But teachers and union officials say it has helped stave off additional spread, and it’s reckless to change it with community rates still high and more contagious variants out there.

“We need to continue the protocols that have helped keep students and school staff safe,” United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said.

Education Department spokeswoman Miranda Barbot acknowledged the rule was “was established before schools opened and there was any data on transmission within a building.”

The DOE is now “taking a close look at the data and this threshold and will make any changes in accordance with public health guidance,” she said.

Families and school staff say it’s not just the frequency of the temporary shutdowns that make them so jarring — it’s their unpredictability.

“It really impacted my son because just the inconsistency of the routine,” said Regina Alston, the mother of a seven-year-old with autism in the Bronx, who described one meltdown prompted by a last-minute school closure that was “so bad that the police happened to get out the car to make sure he’s okay.”

For teachers and school administrators, that unpredictability throws another wrench into the already delicate balancing act of planning for in-person and remote lessons simultaneously.

At P.S. 169 in Brooklyn, teachers have started sending their in-person students home each day with school-issued headphones in case the building shuts down that night and students are forced back into online learning.

“This inconsistency is not good for anyone,” said Lindsey Yang, a Kindergarten teacher at the school.

Ongoing staffing challenges are also hampering schools’ efforts to provide more consistency for students and families.

Only 250 of the nearly 900 schools open for in-person learning are offering five days a week of face-to-face classes to all their students, with another 260 offering full-time in-person learning to a majority of students, city officials said.

Personnel challenges at P186X, the Bronx school for children with complex disabilities where Alston sends her son, grew so severe that the school could no longer accommodate the staffing requirements on the boy’s Individual Education Plan, forcing her to withdraw him from in-person classes.

“There’s just not enough staff in the school to teach,” she said.

Education Department officials said they’re aware of staffing challenges at Alston’s son’s school and are sending additional support.

Neither Alston nor Paulino found the safety net they were hoping for in the city’s Learning Bridges program — a sprawling city-funded childcare network set up to supervise kids on days they’re not in class.

Alston says she never got a response to her application, and Paulino says program staffers told her they didn’t have the resources or expertise to accommodate a child with autism.

An Education Department spokesman said children with disabilities are prioritized for Learning Bridge spots, and no child should be turned away because of a disability.

Both moms are now facing wrenching solutions.

Alston, a single mom who works outside the home as a substance abuse counselor, managed to find childcare by paying a friend to watch her son, but had to drop out of her masters program in Social Work because of the financial and logistical strain of the past few months.

“I was saddened and discouraged, of course worried,” she said of the decision. “I’m in debt now to the tune of $10,000… and I feel like I wasted this money and didn’t accomplish anything.”

Paulino, meanwhile, decided with the help of a special education lawyer to transfer her son to a District 75 school where he will get more individualized support and five days a week of in-person classes.

It was a bittersweet decision, as Paulino loved her son’s old school and worries he might lose out on opportunities by attending a school strictly for students with disabilities.

“I don’t feel very good,” she said, “but I decided to give it a try.”

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