PS 87, located at 160 West 78th Street, is one of several schools with one or more classrooms in full quarantine.
The number of Upper West Side schools with partial or full quarantine classrooms grew from nine on Thursday afternoon to more than double by Friday evening.
As of lunch time on Thursday, November 18, nine different schools in the area were impacted by mandatory COVID classroom closures, according to Patch. About twenty-four hours later, the number grew to twenty-two, according to an interactive map on the Department of Education (DOE) website, which tracks reported cases daily from Sunday through Friday at 6pm.
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Eleven schools have one or more classrooms partially quarantined and an additional eleven have one or more classrooms fully closed. As of 6pm on November 19, the DOE reported 9,127 cumulative positive cases since the start of the school year on September 13, 2021. 6,897 of these positive cases were students and 2,230 were staff. Active positive cases number 247 with 206 of these positives attributed to students.
These COVID closures, as Patch noted, can create chaos for parents with children in the impacted schools, especially those parents who receive paychecks from New York City. 300,000 municipal employees were directed to return to work on September 13. This mandate all but abolished any telework options for city workers.
Mayor de Blasio’s elimination of remote learning options for students was met with mixed reviews earlier this year. Some praised the full return to in-person schooling. The mayor himself championed his surveillance testing program which randomly tests 10% of consenting students on a weekly basis.
Others were not as supportive, including one op-ed author who accused the mayor of child neglect. The opinion piece cited an Education Trust-NY where 79% of parents reportedly supported a remote learning option for their children, citing concerns about their children’s health and safety.
The DOE does offer remote options when classrooms are partially or fully closed. However, the remote option varies and can depend on the grade level of the student and whether teachers make the classrooms live to those students forced to stay home, according to one parent of three with two school-aged children. For those classrooms where a live option is not available or time-limited, students can keep up through Google Classroom where they are able to access assignments. But it was reported to us that not all teachers are uploading assignments.
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Those schools with one or more classrooms partially quarantined are:
- Riverside School for Makers and Artists at 300 West 61 Street
- West End Secondary School at 227 West 61 Street
- Special Music School at 122 Amsterdam Avenue
- P.S. 199 Jessie Isador Straus at 270 West 70 Street
- P.S. 084 Lillian Weber at 32 West 92 Street
- P.S. 333 Manhattan School for Children at 154 West 93 Street
- Community Action School at 154 West 93 Street
- Lafayette Academy at 154 West 93 Street
- P.S. 333 Manhattan School for Children at 154 West 93 Street
- D03 REC at 154 West 93 Street
- H.S. 054 Booker T. Washington at 103 West 107 Street
The schools with one or more classrooms in full quarantine are:
- P.S. 452 at 210 West 61 Street
- Co-op Nursery School Westside YMCA at 5 West 63 Street
- Special Music School at 129 West 67 Street
- P.S. 087 William Sherman at 160 West 78 Street
- LYFE at 145 West 84 Street
- The Global Learning Collaborative at 145 West 84 Street
- The Urban Assembly School for Green Careers at 145 West 84 Street
- Innovation Diploma Plus at 145 West 84 Street
- Frank McCourt High School at 145 West 84 Street
- Success Academy Charter School at 145 West 84 Street
- Project Hope at 987 Columbus Avenue
I am a TPD substitute teacher and often in a different school each day from what I select from the NYC DOE Sub Central site.
I chose Manhattan School for Children on W93rd on Monday Nov 22nd and no one there told me anything about the Covid case. I would have liked to have known, as I could have selected another school from the available choices.