New York City Schools Don’t Have a Plan for Omicron
As a public school teacher, it’s distressing to see how officials’ inaction is endangering both educators and an entire generation of students.
by NYPAN’s own JAKE JACOBS
As New York City rings in 2022 with the Omicron variant of COVID-19, schools are again ground zero for heated debates about how to address the pandemic.
While teachers are clearly concerned about health and safety in schools, city and state officials seem to have decided that Omicron is so mild that we can let it spread widely, in an unstated strategy to move us toward “herd immunity.” A top official of the United Federation of Teachers, our local teachers’ union, for example, even told teachers online that “we’re all going to get it.”
The Omicron variant, although said to present reduced rates of serious illness or death, is nonetheless rapidly filling hospitals and ICUs, particularly among the unvaccinated. The number of new infections continues to set near-daily record highs, with a 22 percent positivity rate across the state and an astonishing 33 percent in New York City.
New York City school teachers like myself are worried about Omicron spreading in poorly ventilated classrooms where students frequently wear masks improperly, if at all. Meanwhile, new guidance from top White House Covid policy officials suggests that any masks other than N95 or KN95 masks are “for show”, meaning the masks worn by my students are considered inadequate. The experts also advise against “over the counter” test kits due to their high inaccuracy rates, yet this is exactly what schools must now rely on.
Teachers in New York City have long questioned former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s reopening policies, but his latest has put students and staff right in the crosshairs—for example distributing rapid at-home tests to students following a positive case in class rather than quarantining. Because Omicron doesn’t generally show up on tests until about five days after exposure, the requirement seems, aside from perhaps picking up prior exposure, a feel-good measure. Ideally, anyone who spends time in a classroom with an Omicron-infected person should quarantine, taking a PCR test on the fifth day. But because this could keep parents from retail and service jobs, the new policy is for those without symptoms to stay in school, taking an unreliable rapid test on the first day, and then again on the fifth day.
Just as flawed was de Blasio’s policy to distribute at-home rapid test kits to teachers after (not before) they returned from break. The immediate backlash led to an announcement by the city’s teachers’ union that all school staff will receive KN95 masks and priority access to twenty-four-hour PCR testing at fifty-two designated sites. If all 160,000 school staff were to come in for tests, however, it would mean that each site would need to average 3,000 tests processed within a few days, a staggering number.
As we saw last year, parents remain split on the issue of school closures. Some insist the harms of student isolation, depression, and ineffective online learning outweigh the health risks.
In the two days before holiday break, as Omicron began to surge, nearly 50 percent of my students stayed home, mirroring last year when parents in my Bronx school were given the choice and chose to go remote in droves. On the first day back after the recent holiday break, citywide attendance was abysmally low, with more than one-third of students staying home.
Because only about 36% of parents have signed testing consent forms, there are now calls to mandate in-school testing. There is also a call to require student vaccinations, but incoming Mayor Eric Adams is delaying that decision until spring.
Another immediate concern in New York City schools is the lack of social distancing in classrooms which are 15 to 30 percent more crowded than the statewide average, particularly in the lower grades.
Recent efforts by parents, teachers, and a majority of New York City Council members to pass legislation to reduce class sizes were thwarted by outgoing Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who refused in the final days of the session to give the health/safety measure a vote even after he had co-sponsored the bill. The bill may later return to the new council, but the advocacy has shifted to the state capital in Albany, where a statewide bill to reduce class sizes is gaining steam just as the election-year legislative session is set to begin.
Back at City Hall, incoming Mayor Adams is causing teachers just as much unease, for example saying, “We must learn to safely live with COVID.” Adams has promised a seamless transition without school closures and a plan to distribute two million KN95 masks to school staff (but not students). None of this addresses a crisis-level staffing shortage that has been exacerbated by the overcrowding and rising infection levels.
In my school, we were short at least four teachers before the school year even started, forcing other teachers to cover their classes, out-of-subject. When teachers are out sick, others have to pitch in to cover more classes and when two more teachers left mid-year, most of our weekly prep periods had to be sacrificed to cover classes.
Losing valuable prep time results in not being able to co-plan, make copies, mark papers, or make parent calls between classes. So in order to properly prepare, it means staying hours after school, which isn’t always possible for teachers who are also parents of young children.
Omicron has also exacerbated a shortage of substitute teachers. Despite lofty promises by school administrations of an ample reserve of substitutes, the reality is that no subs have answered our calls for help this year. Substitute teaching can be a thankless task, and when there are staff shortages all over the city, it’s no surprise that subs prefer schools in Manhattan and more affluent neighborhoods.
It’s also true that classrooms are more difficult to manage this year as students readjust to in-person school after more than a year of being stuck at home. The majority are certainly making up for lost time socializing but some students show signs of anxiousness, impulsivity, and restlessness, while others remain withdrawn and reclusive. Shortages of counselors, school social workers, nurses, and psychologists also mark the current staffing woes.
In issuing its latest guidance to reduce quarantine times in half, the Centers for Disease Control and other officials have acknowledged that policy decisions are now guided by a need to return “essential workers” to their jobs quickly. New York Governor Kathy Hochul made sure this guidance would be applied broadly, affecting not only health care workers but also transportation and grocery store workers, and, clearly, teachers.
But unlike other workers, teachers work indoors in close quarters with students who do not always follow safety protocols, eat communally, and are largely unvaccinated or undervaccinated.
Because of the Omicron wave, urban districts outside of New York City have started announcing temporary switches to remote learning, including those in Atlanta, Georgia; Cleveland, Ohio; Newark, New Jersey; Washington, D.C. and many more. In Chicago, schools were abruptly closed following a safety protocol dispute with teachers who voted to go remote for two weeks.
This year’s goal of restoring normalcy for students was made even harder due to a string of new interruptions to learning time. On top of the usual two days of state testing and my school’s six other standardized exams, six additional standardized tests have been added this year, as well as three social-emotional “screenings.”
But hardest of all for me was telling my most driven art students that their daily access to the art room is permanently canceled because I have to cover a literacy class using a scripted curriculum.
As we all witness the slow-motion train wreck of Omicron, I wonder why there was never a long-term plan to eradicate or reduce COVID. With Omicron now allowed to spread “safely,” it would seem further mutations and more new variants are on the way, with no one able to predict how malicious they will be.
Will future generations look back on us as being unwilling to sacrifice to prevent this crapshoot? Or should we blame the fragility of our retail-based economic model? As we see the as-yet unvaccinated comprising the majority of hospitalizations and deaths, should we blame discordant politics and media disinformation campaigns?
Any way you slice it, adults today are guaranteeing this dystopia will be with U.S. children for a long time. With no long-term plan to eradicate this public health threat in sight, it seems the teacher shortage isn’t going to subside any time soon.