New York, the only major American city planning a face-to-face return to school, postponed this Thursday for the second time the date of the physical return to classes due to concerns from the teachers’ union.
Face-to-face classes from the largest school district in United States, with 1.1 million students, were supposed to start between one and three times a week initially on September 10, and then on September 21.
But now only preschoolers will go to their schools on schedule, the mayor announced Bill de Blasio at a press conference.
Primary students will begin to physically go to school from September 29, and secondary students from October 1.
The union United Federation of Teachers (UFT) he said on his Twitter account that its members found “thousands of operational problems” in schools and that the “enormous shortage of teachers” would have made the reopening on September 21 “a fiasco.”
The thousands of operational issue reports filed by UFT chapter leaders on behalf of their members demonstrated the huge teacher shortage in our schools that would have made a Sept. 21 opening a fiasco.
– UFT (@UFT)
September 17, 2020
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Some schools still have classroom ventilation or internet connection problems. A mother reported this week that a hacker accessed her son’s online class and spread pornographic images. Especially for fear that schools are not safe and their children will catch Covid-19, 42% of parents have opted for totally distance learning for their children, a figure that grew 15% in the last two weeks.
Unions claim that there are not enough teachers to teach so many children online.
There are “real concerns,” De Blasio admitted at a press conference, although he insisted that “nothing replaces face-to-face teaching.”
The mayor announced that the city will hire 2,500 additional teachers, in addition to the 2,000 new teachers hired this week.
“This is a number that gives us what we think we need to get started,” he said.
But unions say it is necessary to hire 10,000, so there would still be a shortage of 5,500 teachers.
Educators have also indicated that the municipal government has failed to trace the contacts of the few teachers who have tested positive for the virus, some 60 people out of a total of 17,000.
Following an agreement with the UFT union, the city will screen 10-20% of the students and staff at each school once a month, starting in October.
If the contagion rate in New York exceeds 3% – it is currently less than 1% – schools must close.
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