School supplies strewn on the sidewalk outside a school in Brooklyn, New York.
Jean-Cosme Delaloye
Notebooks are strewn on the sidewalk outside the school in the heart of Brooklyn, New York. Pencils, tubes of glue, books and worksheets with children’s names also got stranded on the asphalt. The evening in early September when I was confronted with this sad spectacle, we were less than a week before the start of the school year, which took place virtually on Wednesday for 1.1 million New York students.
This scene symbolizes the chaos surrounding back to school in person in New York City. Under pressure from the teachers’ unions, Bill de Blasio, the unpopular and influential mayor of New York, postponed Thursday for the second time the resumption of classes in schools under the pretext of wanting to give teachers more time to prepare and protect yourself from Covid-19. The pupils will therefore not find the school benches before the 1stis October despite a Covid-19 infection rate of less than 1% in New York.
“The future of New York depends on our public schools”
“The future of New York depends on our public schools”, launched Thursday Bill de Blasio in an attempt to keep up appearances and justify his new backtracking. Sixteen days after announcing a first agreement with the teachers’ unions who refuse an in-person instruction during the pandemic, the mayor this week concluded a second truce, the strength of which is just as questionable as the first.
New York City has adopted a hybrid education model combining online and face-to-face instruction. The classes were divided into several groups of ten students who took turns doing two days of school in person. The rest of the lessons take place virtually.
This is where the problems start. Schools do not have enough teachers to guarantee both in-person and online education. Schools also have to put up with some teachers who refuse to come back to teach or be filmed, and 40% of New York families who have opted for entirely distance education.
Union pressure
Added to this is pressure from the main teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, to prevent a re-entry of students in person, already postponed for the first time from 8 to 21 September. Michael Mulgrew, union boss, attended Bill de Blasio’s press conference on Thursday to congratulate the mayor, who once again made him bend and said: “We are protecting our schools, our families, our children and ourselves – even against this horrible situation created by the pandemic. ”
These remarks hardly mask another reality: in the United States, where the influence of unions has continued to melt, the return to school in New York has taken a political turn that goes beyond the health crisis. At the heart of this crucial battle for the future of unions, we find exhausted parents and students out of school for more than six months who dream of resuming a semblance of normal life.