NYC students walk out of classes en masse over allegedly unsafe learning conditions, demand remote learning. City leaders offer wholehearted support.



Hundreds of New York City high schoolers staged a mass walkout Tuesday in protest of supposedly unsafe learning conditions in the city's schools. Meanwhile, city leaders — rather than discouraging the students from leaving — offered them their "wholehearted support."

What happened?

At 11:52 a.m. on Tuesday, scores of students across New York City's five boroughs got up from their seats and exited their school buildings to "urge NYC to offer the necessary remote learning options and safety precautions as COVID cases rise."

The "NYC Student Walkout for COVID Safety" demonstration was the result of a coordinated campaign planned by activists on social media.

According to the Gothamist, a day before the walkout, on Jan. 10, the city reported 11,825 COVID cases among students, amounting to about 1.2% of the 930,000-person student body, and 2,298 cases among staff.

Though it was not immediately clear how many students participated in the walkout, the New York Daily News reported that an estimated 600 teens poured out of Brooklyn Technical High School, the city’s largest school. Hundreds more from other schools also participated, according to local news reports.

Hundreds of kids walked out of Brooklyn Tech today to protest the continuation of in person school during the Omicron wave and to call for a remote optionpic.twitter.com/0HMVAFM2YC
— Jillian Jorgensen (@Jillian Jorgensen) 1641921716

“It doesn’t feel safe to be in school, to be honest," one sophomore student told the Daily News. "In my classes, half the classes aren’t there. Some have COVID, some are afraid of COVID, and the school just isn’t doing anything about it.”

Another 16-year-old student told the Gothamist, “Students like me that have parents that are immunocompromised, students that are themselves immunocompromised, I can't imagine how anxious they are to go into a building and feel like they're putting their lives at risk every day."

Still another student shared the participants' demands with the Gothamist in a phone interview, saying, “The main goal we have is to have a temporary shutdown of schools in NYC and a hybrid option for students who have food insecurities or who need child care. We also want more COVID testing for students and staff and an improved [Department of Education] health screening."

It was not clear whether that student, Samantha Farrow, reportedly a junior at Stuyvesant High School, was one of the student leaders in charge of the campaign.

What was the reaction?

One would think the adults in the room (city) would step up amid the walkout to make it clear to students that they aren't the ones in charge. But instead, some education officials took the opposite approach.

In a statement, the NYC Department of Education said officials “wholeheartedly support civic engagement among New York City students.”

“Nothing is more important than the health and safety of our school communities, and we’ve doubled in-school testing and deployed 5 million rapid tests to quickly identify cases, stop transmission, and safely keep schools open," said department spokesperson Katie O’Hanlon in a statement."

She added that "student voice is key and we’ll continue to listen to and work closely with those most impacted by our decisions — our students."

NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks echoed a similar sentiment in a tweet posted after the walkout, offering to meet with student leaders to work on a solution.

We understand the concerns of our school communities during this crisis. The best decisions are made when everyone has a seat at the table\u2014I\u2019m inviting student leaders to meet with me so we can work together for safe and open schools.
— Chancellor David C. Banks (@Chancellor David C. Banks) 1641932269

Some students across the city were reportedly warned prior to the demonstration not to take part in it. Others were given detention for walking off school grounds and cutting class. But most reportedly received no punishment at all.

Leftists Channel Their Inner Nazi! New York Omicron Insanity! | Louder With Crowder

Leftists Channel Their Inner Nazi! New York Omicron Insanity! | Louder With Crowder

'Get back on the job': New York Post demands that all schools reopen full-time now that teachers have been given vaccines, pulls no punches on unions



In a scathing editorial posted Monday night, the New York Post editorial board demanded that teachers get back in the classrooms for in-person learning and unions get out of the way now that New York City is vaccinating teachers against COVID.

What's happening?

New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza announced over the weekend that teachers and education workers are being prioritized for vaccinations and urged all education employees to make appointments to get their shots.

We’re relieved that teachers & education workers are starting to be eligible for COVID-19 vaccination like fellow N… https://t.co/ko23WkwyS6
— Chancellor Richard A. Carranza (@Chancellor Richard A. Carranza)1610317062.0

With that news, many advocates, parents, and members of the media began to call for all Big Apple schools to be fully reopened instead of the part-time and/or hybrid schedules the city elected to employ last fall.

The Post made its position clear in a staff editorial titled "Teacher vaccinations mean all schools should reopen full-time ASAP."

The piece began by going after the teachers' unions that have stood in the way of a return to full-time in-person instruction:

Good news: New York City began vaccinating teachers against COVID-19 on Monday. That leaves the teachers' union no excuse for continuing to oppose in-person learning: Classrooms at all grade levels must reopen so our kids can get the education they're entitled to — but have lost out on for nearly a year.

The United Federation of Teachers has long stood in the way of getting back into classrooms daily, despite the fact that experts repeatedly stated that kids are a very low-risk population for catching or transmitting the coronavirus. But, in the words of the Post, the union "doesn't care about the science — or the students."

The UFT, the paper said, threatened lawsuits and strikes to avoid getting back into the classrooms before the school year started. The union agreed to go back to work only after Mayor Bill de Blasio was forced to offer new concessions. But the UFT wasn't done there, the editorial noted; it has repeatedly tried to get schools closed and to avoid any reopenings — even some "more radical factions" demanded that all Gotham schools remain closed "until the whole city is basically virus-free."

The need to get back into the schools is obvious to the Post's editorial board:

Middle- and high-school students haven't seen the inside of a classroom since the city shut schools on Nov. 19. Though even that was only part-time. Pre-kindergarten and elementary students resumed a “hybrid" learning last month, while special-needs kids returned to classrooms full-time. Kudos to de Blasio for getting that much done; children needing special ed are particularly ill-served by remote classes.

But all kids need to go back, full-time. “Without in-person instruction, schools risk children falling behind academically and exacerbating educational inequities," warned a National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine report last year. Nathaniel Beers, coauthor of the American Academy of Pediatrics' report, explained that all children suffer under remote learning, even teens: “Adolescence is a period of time in life when you are to be exploring your own sense of self and developing your identity," he said. “It's difficult to do that if you are at home with your parents all the time."

It's far past time, the paper said, for students to get back into the classroom — and with vaccines in the arms of teachers, there's no longer any reason not to.

"New York's children have lost nearly a year of education," the Post said. "It's long past time they get to learn in a classroom again."