Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Hochul Work Together to Bring Kids Back to School Jan. 3

By Yehudit Garmaise

“Schools are safe, and schools are where children need to be,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said this morning as he described the tremendous efforts the city and state are making around the clock to ensure that the city’s 1 million public school students can return to in-person learning on Jan. 3, 2022, despite the COVID surge, due to the Omicron variant.

“President Biden has been so clear and strong on this message, and I agree with him 100%,” Mayor de Blasio said this morning. “The science is clear: Schools need to be open for kids’ physical health, mental health, nutrition needs, social-development needs, and academic needs.

“It is so important that we get our kids back in school as soon as this winter break is over,” said Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has issued a statewide mandate for children in schools. “We saw the failed experiment, despite the very best efforts of incredibly hard-working, passionate teachers who did their very best during remote teaching: and the parents who were just pulling their hair out at kitchen tables trying to make sure that it worked successfully.

“Everyone did their part, but we also understand, schools are safe, as a result of our joint mandates,” such as Gov. Hochul’s mask mandate for schoolchildren and the mayor’s vaccine mandate for all employees of the Department of Education (DOE.) “We all have to do our part to make sure that parents feel comfortable when they send their children back to school on Jan. 3.”

The city and state’s new approach to keeping schools open is called, “Stay Safe and Stay Open,” and started with a wide distribution of tests in the classroom, said Gov. Hochul who directed the Department of Homeland Security Emergency Services to provide 2 million tests to NYC to allow children to stay in school.

When a class has an outbreak of COVID, the other children can test at home, and if they test negative, they can come back to school, she explained.

“We will make sure that every kid had a test kit, and this will guarantee more consistency in their education.”

In addition, the schools will increase their PCR testing from once to twice a week, said the mayor, who explained that the increased testing, which will include both vaccinated and unvaccinated students, teachers, and staff, the mayor said, will provide health officials with “greater sample sizes in each school: so we get even more accurate, clear results.”

Dave Chokshi, MD, the city’s health commissioner pointed out the schools’ “layers of protection,” such as vaccination, testing, masking, ventilation, and social distancing that keep children, staff, and teachers safe.

The primary “layer of protection” in schools, of course, is the DOE’s high vaccination rate, after the mayor mandated that they get their shots. Also, increasing the vaccination rate is the eligibility of children ages 5 and up to get vaccinated, which is more important than ever, now that the hospitalization rate of young people for COVID-19 has quadrupled, according to the New York State Department of Health.

“The only children who are getting sick are the unvaccinated,” Gov. Hochul said. “We could avert all of this if every child were vaccinated. We already have hundreds of thousands of kids who are safely vaccinated. This variant is affected children more than previous variants, which were different. That was a different variant.”

“We know the most important [way to guard against hospitalizations and death] is vaccination,” the mayor said. “We know it works and everyone double down on it. Remember to get the booster, and up to Friday, you can still get that $100 incentive.”

 Photo: Flickr