NEW YORK — Middle schools will reopen Thursday for in-classroom instruction — and Mayor Bill de Blasio says he hopes high schools are not far behind.
"I hope to, in the next few weeks, have an announcement on high schools. Everything's lining up — the situation with COVID, even though we're very watchful, watching the data and watching the science, concerned about the variants, but, overall, we've certainly seen improvement; more vaccinations every day,” he said.
Among those being vaccinated: teachers and other schools staff.
"About 30,000 educators have been vaccinated, but we'll get you a specific update on that,” de Blasio promised Wednesday, offering the city’s first numbers on teacher vaccinations.
The education department says that's out of about 94,000 educators. The tally does not include paraprofessionals who work in city schools — among those hardest hit by the pandemic last spring. Nor does it count educators inoculated at sites run by the state or private hospitals, including sites in the vaccination program run by the United Federation of Teachers, which has vaccinated 8,000 staffers so far.
"Long before we even had the vaccine available, we had proven the safety of New York City public schools because of the gold standard we've set,” de Blasio said.
That includes increased COVID-19 testing, with 20% of a school's population swabbed each week. Difficulty administering that many tests each week is one reason the system has been slow to fully reopen after it closed in November. But the mayor says the city is prepared to expand its testing and tracing capacity to enable high schools to resume in classroom instruction.
"We have already planned out what we're going to do with high school on the testing side, and are continuing to grow that so that we're ready. As the mayor said, we will have the capacity for that. We have identified it. We just have to put in place,” said Jeff Thamkittikasem, director of the Mayor’s Office of Operations.
De Blasio says the city is also considering changes to the current requirement that an individual school close if it has two confirmed but unlinked COVID-19 cases. That low threshold has created uncertainty for parents and school staff.
"We want to find a way to handle things that focuses on health and safety first but keeps kids in school more, and we'll have more to say on that soon,” he said.
But with four months left in the school year, the city will have to reach a decision soon.
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