On any given day this January, Sabina McNamara, an English Language Arts teacher at a middle school in Brooklyn, has taught a total of about seventy students. But, while the number itself is relatively fixed, she said, the kids themselves keep changing. “There’s a core of about thirty students who have been coming every day, and the other forty—it varies,” she told me. “Every morning is, ‘Who’s coming to school today?’ ” Some of her students have been out owing to COVID-19 infections or exposures. Others are being kept home out of parental caution: “It’s a mix of families who have had bad experiences with COVID, multigenerational households, people with underlying conditions,” she said. A number of the students are unvaccinated. McNamara, whose sixth graders have been exploring how writers of nonfiction develop a central idea, has slowed the pace of instruction to prevent her absent students from falling too far behind. To stretch out her curricula, she assigns four or five pieces per topic instead of two. “We’re going deeper, even if we’re not necessarily going forward,” she said.
Across New York’s school system, teachers are in a holding pattern. According to data from the city’s Department of Education, about a quarter of enrolled students—well over two hundred thousand—were absent from school on Friday, January 14th, with at least sixty-seven schools reporting attendance below fifty per cent. Over-all in-person attendance was even lower, as some schools marked students as present if they uploaded work to Google Classroom or checked in remotely with their teachers. In many cases, teachers themselves are home with COVID, leaving overextended colleagues to stand in for them. Last week, the Brooklyn elementary school where my son attends pre-kindergarten was missing both of its lead pre-K teachers, and one of those teachers’ classes had only two children present. McNamara has covered for teachers of science (“We’re learning about the moon—I don’t know that much about the moon”) and Spanish (“It’s definitely weird—I know very little Spanish”). “The kids are not getting the full educational experience that they deserve,” she told me. “But they are also very aware that we’re still in the middle of a crisis.” (By January 19th, official attendance had climbed to eighty-three per cent, compared to a pre-pandemic average of about ninety-two per cent.)
Becka Mayfield, a tenth- and twelfth-grade special-education teacher in Brooklyn, told me that her current lessons tend to lean heavily on review of the previous day’s material, because the students “didn’t retain anything, they weren’t focussed, or they weren’t here.” In a class of fifteen students, Mayfield has taught as few as five at a time since the Omicron variant struck. (On two consecutive days, Mayfield had enough extra space that another class, whose teacher was absent with no substitute, sat in the empty seats.) The lower the in-person numbers are, the harder it is for Mayfield to engage the students. “Ninety-five per cent of our conversations are about who’s here and who’s not here,” she said. “I’ll say, ‘Do you guys want to learn about World War One?’ And they’re, like, ‘Are we going remote?’ ”
Eric Adams, the Mayor of New York, and his schools chancellor, David Banks, began the year—and Adams’s tenure—refuting any suggestion that, owing to astronomical COVID rates, critical staff shortages, and low attendance, the city’s schools might temporarily switch to remote learning until Omicron abated. Adams dismissed concerns about coronavirus safety in schools and called remote learning a “luxury” that is beyond the means of some public-school families who lack stable housing or high-speed Internet connections, and who are more likely to be Black and brown. (The New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait echoed these same points in a piece published on Monday, titled “School Closures Were a Catastrophic Error. Progressives Still Haven’t Reckoned With It.”) This refrain is contradicted, however, by the fact that Black and brown parents are much more likely than white parents to want a remote option. “It’s not because the families liked remote more,” Andrea Castellano, who teaches a third-grade gifted-and-talented class in Brooklyn, said. “They were disproportionately affected by the pandemic, and they decided that their kids were safer at home. I’ve been trying to meet them where they are.”
Castellano teaches in Brownsville, where about ninety-seven per cent of the population is Black or Hispanic. Many children and adults have asthma or other underlying conditions. “Our neighborhood also has lower vaccination rates and higher rates of infection than a lot of other neighborhoods in the city,” she said. Most of her students are unvaccinated. Like other teachers with whom I spoke, Castellano supports a vaccine mandate for New York City public-school students, which Mayor Adams is reportedly considering. (Across New York City, just thirty-two per cent of children aged five to twelve are fully vaccinated, and seventy-five per cent of children aged thirteen to seventeen. White children are about as likely as Black children to be vaccinated; Hispanic children are considerably more likely, and an overwhelming majority of Asian American children are fully vaxxed.)
Annie Tan is a special-education teacher at an elementary school in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park. It is home to a high number of Spanish- and Chinese-speaking immigrants who cannot necessarily decipher written communications about COVID exposures and protocols. (On one occasion, students who returned a positive result on an in-school PCR test arrived for classes the next day as usual, and teachers were forced to pull them out of line.) “Every day, we have six to seven new cases, and, when parents find out, some of them say, ‘I don’t want to send my child to school,’ ” Tan told me. “One-third of the students are out at any given time.”
Tan usually teaches eight students; in mid-January, she was seeing three or four each day. Only one of the students is particularly talkative. In spare moments, the class has been playing games: Guess Who?, Connect Four, and Battleship. (“Playing a socially distanced game of Battleship teaches them about graphing, and also lets them practice communicating with each other,” Tan said.) When her absent students come back, she told me, “the learning isn’t necessarily coming back, because other people will be quarantining.” Tan posts lessons several weeks ahead in Google Classroom, in case she contracts COVID.
Low attendance can create a feedback loop: older students with some degree of autonomy may be disinclined to show up when they know that their friends will be absent. Or parents may take their kids out once the school reaches some imagined threshold of positive cases. (I have felt this gravitational pull more than once at morning drop-off—if so many kids aren’t here, maybe mine shouldn’t be, either.) A principal in Brooklyn, whom I will call D., leads a school that enrolls about seven hundred students; lately, he has felt an urgent need to track each of them. It’s “a delicate dance,” D. said. “You have to be able to do it without hounding families who are already stressed.”
Since the Omicron surge began, many teachers have been spending their lunches, prep periods, and after-school hours video-conferencing with students who provide proof of a positive COVID test or who are affected by a classroom closure. On January 14th, however, the D.O.E. updated language on its Web site to give schools more discretion to offer these online office hours to students who miss school for any reason. (Multiple schools had already been quietly offering this option to anxious but COVID-negative families. Chancellor Banks, for his part, suggested that teachers in schools hard-hit by Omicron could “just do a live stream” of their classrooms.) The change in policy appeared to indicate Adams’s newfound openness toward a broader range of remote-learning options, but, in a January 18th press conference, he emphasized that his administration’s “exploration of anything remote is to target the children who are infected”—and not the hesitant families that Castellano, Tan, and others described. “It is not just to send a signal out that if you don’t want to come to school, don’t come to school,” Adams said.
At the moment, it is not necessarily clear who is coming to school. The new guidelines mean that more students at home are eligible to be marked present for checking in with a teacher via video or uploading classwork to Google Classroom. When I asked if the D.O.E. has an estimate of what percentage of students are physically in school every day, as opposed to marked present, a spokesperson responded, “We post our daily attendance figures online.”
The general uncertainty has parallels with the earliest days of remote learning, back in the spring of 2020. Castellano said, “At first it was, ‘If they do an assignment, you count them as present.’ Then it became, ‘If you have any interaction with them, then it counts as present.’ Then it became, ‘If you have a conversation with their parent and they say that their child will do the assignments, then it counts as present.’ ” She went on, “It becomes a philosophical question: What does it mean to be ‘present’?”
Castellano taught a hybrid class for the entirety of the 2020-2021 school year, and described the difficulty of splitting her attention between the children on a Zoom screen and the children physically in front of her, as well as the added labor of adapting curricula for both groups. “Remote teaching is infinitely harder and more time-consuming,” she said. “It’s really an extra job.” D., the Brooklyn principal, acknowledged that remote learning generates vastly more work for burned-out teachers. “I have a teacher who expressed frustration that a lot of the families that are staying home—not because of a positive case, just out of fear—are expecting a lot from her,” he told me. “She is doing so much extra work every night because they are demanding specific, differentiated work for each child, and that is really draining her.”
Yet even those who dread remote teaching may accept the need for more of it. “Teaching elementary-school kids remotely does not work,” Sarah Jingleman, an English as a New Language teacher at a school in Queens, told me. She taught from home during the 2020-21 school year owing to pregnancy. “It didn’t work academically, but it really didn’t work emotionally and behaviorally.” Still, she sees the utility of offering more remote options, because, in January, “we had so many kids who were not getting any education at all, because their parents won’t send them in.” It’s also the case that in-person school isn’t what it was before COVID—and won’t be for a long time. If Zoom flattens people and concepts into two dimensions, the masking and social-distancing requirements of the pandemic era produce their own alienation effects. “I am amazed at how much harder it is to work and learn when you’re separated from everyone by three feet,” Jingleman said. “The kids are tired. They seem lower-energy. The inconsistency contributes to their lack of engagement and anxiety.”
During this week’s press conference, Adams said, “We consistently have stated that the safest place for a child is in school.” The following day, a D.O.E. spokesperson told me, in an e-mail, “Our schools are the safest places for young people to be.” I have heard this idea expressed many times by city officials since December, but I can never parse its precise meaning. It doesn’t mean that children (or educators) are safe from COVID transmission—there is no force field that dissolves infectious particles on contact as they approach these buildings, many of which are poorly ventilated and in general disrepair. It doesn’t mean that young people who were devastated by the loss of a loved one or caregiver to COVID, or who live with elderly or immunocompromised relatives, believe that they are safe from the virus now. It might, at best, evoke a kind of emotional safety, an uncommon sense of warmth and fellowship, which several teachers described seeing in their kids: the patient middle schooler who read a book with a restless special-needs classmate when no paraprofessional was available, or the happy few in a third-grade class who wrote a screenplay together about a haunted house when their teacher decided to pause between writing units because of a lack of attendance. And, certainly, schools can be a place of safety for children in the shelter system (whose attendance dropped steeply when classes went remote) or whose home environments are otherwise unstable.
But, in the city’s insistence that schools are the safest place for children to be, perhaps the underlying, disquieting message is that no place is really safe. Matt Rohrer, a tenth-grade special-education teacher and social worker at a Manhattan high school, believes that adults underestimate “how anxious the kids are—when there’s an announcement of COVID in their class, they get really scared.” He went on, “I’ve personally had students hospitalized this school year, being treated for COVID, on oxygen. There’s a reason people are scared. How many other jobs ask you to be in a building with five hundred people every day?”