New York City first went into lockdown in March, when COVID-19 was solidifying itself as a global threat. NYC, along with many other school systems across the country, closed its public schools in response to the pandemic, and became the first major public school system in the United States to reopen them in early October (Shapiro & Zaveri, 2020). In mid-November, after hitting a three percent weekly rolling average for Covid cases, the school system closed once again. In early December, with a third wave of COVID-19 cases sweeping the United States and tallying upwards of 180,000 new cases per day, NYC has announced that it would reopen its elementary schools, despite still being above that three percent positivity rate (Statistica, 2020; Goodman, 2020). Now, in mid-December, over 170 of those recently reopened school buildings have already closed, the countrywide cases per day peaked at over 240,000 on December 13, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has suggested that the city might go back into lockdown (Statistica, 2020; MORE-UFT, 2020; Gross, 2020).
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Sixty percent of parents had initially preferred that schools wait to reopen in order to reduce risk; among parents of color, 76 percent wanted to wait to reopen as opposed to 50 percent of white parents, illustrating that the racial divide that persists even down to the level of community desires (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2020). On December 6, despite being a system with more Black students than White students, the NYC public school system saw 12,000 more White students than Black students return to school (Shapiro, 2020).
Total remote learning is still a reality for NYC’s upper grade level students, as it was at the beginning of the school year, and questions and concerns surrounding remote-learning and school reopening equity remain. By sending elementary students back to school separately, some have observed that their communities of parents and teachers have become separated from the rest of the public school system, making it more difficult for them to mobilize in conjunction with teachers, parents, and students from those upper grade levels (Tan, 2020).
Reopening circumstances have varied dramatically depending on school resources; some schools have been forced to use windows for ventilation, creating difficult and uncomfortable environments for the students and teachers in those classrooms as temperatures drop (Ricciulli, 2020). In the midst of these circumstances, Covid-19 cases among school staff are rising: Press NYC observed on December 19 that staff cases had increased 13 percent from the previous week (Press NYC, 2020).