School districts across the country are signaling the pandemic is over….
Student’s are to return to classrooms….
New York City will no longer have a remote schooling option come fall, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Monday, in a major step toward fully reopening the nation’s largest school system.
This school year, most of the city’s roughly one million students — about 600,000 of them — stayed at home for classes. When the new school year starts on Sept. 13, all students and staff will be back in school buildings full-time, Mr. de Blasio said.
“This is going to be crucial for families,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference. “So many parents are relieved, I know.”
New York is one of the first big U.S. cities to remove the option of remote learning altogether for the coming school year. But widespread predictions that online classes would be a fixture for school districts may have been premature. Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey announced last week that the state would no longer have remote classes come fall, after similar announcements by leaders in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
New York City’s decision will make it much easier to restore its school system to a prepandemic state, since students and teachers will no longer be split between homes and school buildings.
Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, expressed support for the mayor’s announcement in a statement, saying the city’s teachers union wanted “as many students back in school as safely as possible.”
Still, he acknowledged that “a small number of students with extreme medical challenges” may face difficulty returning to in-person learning with the pandemic still a threat and said that a remote option could be necessary for those children.
Mr. de Blasio said that the school system would have “plenty of protections” in place when the school year begins. But his announcement will no doubt alarm some parents who remain concerned about sending their children back into school buildings, even as the pandemic ebbs in the United States….