Mayor Bill de Blasio denies his school reopening plan, coming in at a few dozen pages, is thin on details, calling it “a very elaborate structure.”
His comments come after the Cuomo administration criticized New York City’s school reopening plan over the weekend. On Sunday, senior Cuomo official Jim Malatras said the de Blasio administration’s 32-page reopening plan was comparable to an “outline” and not as extensive as other school districts, like Yonkers, which submitted an 80-page report.
Speaking on his weekly “Mondays with the Mayor” interview on Inside City Hall on Monday night, the mayor countered, saying the number of pages of the city’s back-to-school plan shouldn’t matter.
“It’s certainly not the number of pages that matter. It’s what the content is. It’s what it says. For months and months, folks at the Department of Education have been working nonstop to get ready for something we’ve never dealt with before,” de Blasio said in his interview with NY1 Political Anchor Errol Louis.
“The Department of Education went to the really, really focused effort of finding out what parents thought and they got over 400,000 parents responding to a survey and overwhelmingly we heard that parents want their kids back at school. There’s been a lot of careful work done to get ready and that plan reflects it,” he continued.
The plan, which was unveiled by the mayor and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza on Friday, has also drawn criticism from parents and advocates. The city’s “blended learning” model — which consists of some students heading to classrooms two to three days out of the week and learning remotely at other points in the week — has left many families wondering how they will manage child care.
The mayor told NY1 that the “blended model” class schedules will be sent out to students around August 15, giving parents about a month to figure out how they will navigate the city’s new school model.
“It’s not going to be easy,” de Blasio said. “We don’t know how long this interim period is before a vaccine, but it’s not forever. And New York City parents are very creative, very resourceful. We’re going to help them every step of the way, but I can at least tell you they will have their schedules very soon so they can start to make those arrangements.”
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Watch the full “Mondays with the Mayor” interview above.
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