Schools Can Reopen, Everyone Has To get Tested, Kids Have To Opt In – Will They?

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced today in a call with the press that all schools in the red and orange zones can open as long as ‘everybody’ is tested before returning to school, and only those testing negative for COVID19 are allowed back in.

The regimen will then require that 25% of all students and staff in attendance have to be tested every week. If the number of cases exceeds 9, the school will be ordered closed. In NYC, at schools where testing at 25% the sample size of those tested exceeds 300, the number of positive cases needs to exceed 2% for the school to be ordered closed. Rapid tests will be provided to schools by the state.

No further information has yet been available from the Schools Chancellor.

On another note – Mayor Bill De Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza informed parents this week that they have to opt kids back into in-person school next week if they want them to attend in person this school year at all.

Carranza explained the thinking behind that useless return to school survey, and finally essentially acknowledged that it was poorly designed, did not answer the questions in a meaningful way, and lead to this horrific situation with blended learning in his CPAC (Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Committee) meeting yesterday:

However, while the administration claimed to be offering in-person school to help the working-class folks, those are exactly the people opting to keep their kids home, and local politicians are on their side.

Lastly – curious about the COVID19 numbers in the ‘Southern Brooklyn Cluster’? They are a bit hard to find. Here is a table showing you the 4 week infection rates by zip code (identical to what you can see on NYC DOH site today – but not tomorrow as it will update). We will try to get more accurate numbers early next week.

This shows you how many folks got tested, and how many tested positive over the last 4 weeks. Not a hugely meaningful number, other than to say that we had a problem in Southern BK in October.

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