Public schools in the city of NY will be closed until the end of the school year due to coronavirusThe mayor announced on Saturday, although the state governor later clarified that the final decision is his and must be adopted in coordination with the metropolitan area.
“Closing our public schools for the rest of the (school) year is not easy, but it is necessary to save lives,” said Bill de Blasio, announcing the “painful” decision at a press conference.
The measure affects 1.1 million children and youth in the city’s public schools, who have been taking online classes since March 16.
Bill de Blasio said he made the decision after a conversation he had on Friday with Anthony Fauci, the US government’s top scientist in the fight against Covid-19.
However, Governor Andrew Cuomo, a longtime rival of the mayor, said shortly after that the decision on how long schools should be closed is up to him and should be made in a coordinated manner with the rest of the metropolitan area, and ideally together with neighboring states. from New Jersey and Connecticut.
“You can’t make a decision just for New York City without coordinating with the entire metropolitan area, because everything works together,” Cuomo told reporters.
Asked whether it is he who has the legal power to close New York City schools, he replied: “It is my legal authority in this situation, yes.”
“I understand the position of the mayor, who wants to close them until June, and maybe we will, but we will do it in a coordinated way with the other localities,” he added.
Roderick Hills, a professor of constitutional and administrative law at New York University, explained to AFP that the mayor has the power to close schools, and that to stop it, the governor should issue an executive order.
“The governor has never suspended the mayor’s power to close schools. The emergency order (in New York State) suspends many local powers, but not the mayor’s power to close schools,” he said.
“The mayor’s order is valid until the governor overrules it with a contrary order or another that replaces it,” he added.
The schools would only reopen their doors in September, for the start of the new school year.
“We are right”
“The governor’s reaction to our decision to close schools recalls how he reacted when the mayor called for isolation” of the population by the virus, said De Blasio’s spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein.
“We were right then and we are right now. Schools will remain closed, in the same way that eventually – days later – we go into a model of isolation,” Goldstein added on his Twitter account.
Cuomo last Monday extended the closure of all schools in the state to April 29.
The death toll due to Covid-19 it continues to rise in the Big Apple and exceeds 5,800. More than 92,000 city residents have been infected.
In the last 24 hours the state registered 783 deaths, just less than the record of 799 last Thursday.
The figure “is stabilizing, but at an appalling rate,” Cuomo said.
But in New York state, the most affected by the pandemic in the United States, “the number of hospitalizations seems to have reached the apex, and the apex appears to be a plateau,” Cuomo said. “All the numbers are on a downward curve.”
The state of New York, with 19 million inhabitants, already registers more than 170,000 cases of the coronavirus – more than Italy, Spain or France – and more than 8,627 deaths, according to the latest official balance.
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