NEW: As schools face a staffing crunch, @NYCSchools will no longer require that blended learning students be given synchronous (aka live) instruction every day they're remote. Live teaching time will vary by school. Fully remote will still get live teaching daily. More soon.
Schools will no longer be required to offer ANY live instruction on blended students' remote days if they don't have the staff available to do so.
This is a major change in guidance, and in what students will experience, and comes, oh, 12 hours before they're logging on tomorrow.
Shout out to my pal @danrivoli for getting this news on the air for me, because I am currently not camera ready (aka I am in my pajamas because I am on the morning show early tomorrow)
If you're a parent with a child in blended learning, this may mean -- depending on your school -- your child may be in person once or twice a week, and then working remotely without any kind of live connection to their teacher on the other days.
Fully remote students will get live instruction every day. The number of parents choosing remote has been increasing... wonder what next week's numbers update will show us.
My story will be up shortly but one thing I want to note is that if a school DOES have the staff to provide live instruction on blended remote days, they can, and DOE says they're working toward increasing the amount of it every school provides.
More than 30 years after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, just one-third of the city’s public schools are accessible to people with physical disabilities: ny1.com/nyc/all-boroug…
This limits the educational options available to children who use wheelchairs, like 14-year-old Mia Simpson.
“It saddens me that a child has to be excluded from programs that they might enjoy, that they might like, just because of physical disability,” her mom said.
Mia’s District 75 school didn’t have an elevator. In fourth grade, all her friends began moving to classrooms upstairs. She noticed — but she couldn’t join them.
Ultimately, her mom pulled her from the school, and the DOE now pays her tuition at a private school.
.@NYCMayor says new CDC guidance will help city schools “reach more kids”
The CDC has evaluated the evidence and has decided the distance between children in schools can go from six feet to three feet, @NYCMayor says, and that will mean a NEW opt-in period for students.
The opt in will begin with younger students — those through fifth grade. CDC guidance treats them differently than middle and high schoolers.
NEW: NYC middle school buildings will re-open February 25th. About 62,000 students who previously opted-in to in-person instruction will be able to attend. That’s out of about 196,000 middle school students total.
School staff will be back the day before, Feb. 24th. DOE says there are plans to increase the capacity of the situation room, which tracks cases, and its school testing teams.
Teachers and staff who would be returning to in-person instruction at middle schools will be prioritized for the vaccines over February break, which is from 2/12-2/21.
District 75 schools re-open this week and @NYCMayor himself says these students need school the most.
Despite having just 5 students, Sofia’s class still won’t have full in person learning. She’ll be in school every other week. The week she’s not there, her classroom is empty.
“It’s kind of like, you give her a piece of candy and you take it away,” her mother told me.
DOE did not answer specific questions about why Sofia’s school was still blended, but said they expected the school to be five days a week, every week, soon.
.@NYCMayor also reiterating some ground rules for school families:
—Kids won’t be allowed to attend in person without permission slips
—If you signed up for blended learning you have to show up and if you don’t, you’ll be switched to remote learning
.@NYCMayor seeming to cast doubt on the assessments of principals who say they don’t have capacity for five day a week instruction, which I’m sure they are really going to love hearing after moving heaven and earth to accommodate the mayor’s shifting policies throughout the year!
There seems to be a lot of confusion about the move to five days a week! The city is not suddenly doubling class sizes. This is happening essentially because many fewer kids opted in to blended than expected...
...so few opted in (or actually showed up) that, in some unknown number of schools, they don't need to be split into multiple cohorts.
This is already the reality at some schools -- so many students are all-remote that in-person kids attend five days a week.
If you're a school where tons of kids are attending in person and your class has three cohorts of 11 kids each, no you're not suddenly teaching 33 kids. The announcement today was an increase in days where possible.