The first blizzard since 2016 led NYC to declare the first official snow day in seven years on Feb. 23. That snow day made a lot of students and staff happy but that joy disappeared the next day when the city opted to have Tuesday, Feb. 24, be in-person instead of remote.
Chancellor Kamar H. Samuels said that the city decided to go in-person because it couldn’t ensure that all schools had the tools ready to go remote.
This logic didn’t apply to Bronx River because the school already goes remote 10 days a year. This upset students and staff with many opting to stay home. At BRHS, student attendance dropped to 56 percent and 21 staff members didn’t come in. Throughout NYC, about 40 percent of students didn’t attend.
The decision to be in-person disappointed Tene Kelly, an assistant principal. “Throughout all the fall we were doing remote classes while the previous Chancellor was sending us frequent surveys to ask if we were prepared to go remote,” she said.
Bronx River, which strives to keep attendance over 90 percent, doesn’t want the Feb. 24 attendance to count. “We are asking the central office not to include today’s attendance rate in the yearly average because that’s not fair,’’ Ms. Kelly said on Feb. 24
Although Bronx River has its own schedule for online school throughout the year, the school wasn’t allowed to call an emergency remote day. “The reason we’re allowed to do remote Fridays is because we give families the option to opt-in or opt-out, so we can’t just call our own remote day by ourselves,” she said.
Joseph Diodato, a computer science teacher and United Federation of Teachers (UFT) union delegate, thinks that remote school is the better option in the snow to ensure every student’s safety. “The union’s belief was that it was dangerous to come back so quickly. While the roads are clear, some streets and sidewalks aren’t,’’ he said. “It’s ridiculous that we have remote learning tools and don’t use them.”
Diodato says that the union is working to make sure teachers who didn’t come in because of transportation or safety issues get an excused absence.
Bronx River students who opted to come in struggled to get to school. Christofer Tineo, a freshman, said this was one of the worst commutes he’s ever had. “I usually take the bus, but because of the blizzard, the MTA only used the smaller buses,’’ he said. “I couldn’t get on one at all since they were full, so I had to walk 20 minutes to school in that horrid weather.’’
Christopher would have preferred being online. “There was practically no reason to go because everything we learned could’ve been done easily online.’’
However, some students prefer in-person classes, no matter the weather. “It was just better because I wanted to see my girlfriend,” David Arevalo, a junior, said. “Also, I have a lot of work to catch up on and I know I’d get distracted online.”
Other schools in the city also had transportation issues. Wenni Lu, a student at Stuyvesant High School, noted that some students had to travel from different boroughs, especially at specialized high schools. “I was one of the lucky students who had a functional train commute,” she said. “But I know my peers had to wait an hour for the ferry and got to school at fourth period.”
Monique Paes, a literacy teacher, said “One of the morning lunch ladies slipped and fell from the last snowstorm and got severely injured. The commute has been unsafe, with the sidewalks still slippery.”
However, she understands why schools should stay open. “NYC public schools are one of the only places that have things like hot meals every day,” she said. “Sometimes the school is one of the only places where kids in dysfunctional homes have safety.”
“It’s a dilemma: You wanna be able to provide shelter for kids but not at the risk of another kid’s safety, so it’s hard,’’ she said.
