Testimony before the New York City Council Committees on Education and Health

My name is Michael Mulgrew and I am the president of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). On behalf of the more than 190,000 UFT members, I would like to thank Chairpersons Mark Treyger and Mark Levine and all the members of the New York City Council’s Committees on Education and Health for holding this crucial hearing on the reopening of New York City (NYC) public school buildings for the 2020-21 school year as it relates to the health and safety of our school communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I first want to thank our educators, paraprofessionals, school secretaries, school nurses, guidance counselors, therapists, school administrators and other vital staff for the tremendous work they have put into safely reopening our school buildings for our blended learning model.

To this day, we remain the only large public school district in the country to provide in-person instruction for our students; and I am relieved to report that so far, we have done so while avoiding any major spike or surge in COVID-19 cases in our buildings. Other school systems have seen surges within days of re-opening.

This was made possible because we did not rush to re-open. We planned thoughtfully under the guidance of public health experts from Northwell Health and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and we gradually brought students back into our school buildings by grade level to help us implement our plan as we simultaneously evaluated our implementation.

The UFT was able to take a lead in the school system’s COVID-19 health and safety planning because of the union’s decades’ long track record of prioritizing safe and healthy environments in the schools where our members serve and our city’s children learn.

The union, as a pioneer in this field, brought industrial hygiene and occupational health and safety expertise and services into its portfolio more than 20 years ago. This work evolved into creating and implementing schoolwide safety and health programs, with an emphasis on laboratory and vocational inspections and remediation protocols for school renovations.

It was the same UFT team that brought this expertise to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on our city and continues to advocate on behalf of educators, students and residents who still suffer the health effects of that catastrophe.

So, the UFT had an infrastructure, knowledge base and the medical contacts needed to develop a plan and monitor key areas of COVID-19 safety in our schools: personal protection equipment; social distancing and health protocols; building ventilation; and testing.

School building reopening health and safety

Our union is committed to the health and safety of our school communities. We have always been aware of the urgent need for in-person learning, particularly for our most vulnerable students, but would never allow them to enter school buildings deemed unhealthy and unsafe. Going back to April, we recognized that our school district’s plan to reopen our school buildings for the blended learning model was inadequate and did not meet the health and safety standards prescribed by experts.

In an effort to strengthen our district’s health and safety plan, our union consulted public health experts from Northwell Health and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to help us develop additional guidelines for a plan that would make our school administrators, staff, and families feel more secure about returning to our buildings for in-person instruction.

With their guidance, we developed a UFT 50-item safety checklist containing a set of requirements individual school buildings had to meet before they would be considered safe to open.

Armed with these checklists, the UFT union representatives in every school and program inspected their own sites to make sure the necessary safeguards were in place: a school nurse in each building; a 30-day supply of PPE tailored to the unique population of each school; a COVID-19 building response team; and an operational understanding of the required safety protocols and social distancing requirements.

These school inspections were augmented by UFT staff, including health and safety experts in ventilation, who reviewed some of the system's most problematic school buildings for correct airflow.

Our collective work — and vocal agitation — helped spur the Department of Education, Division of School Facilities and the School Construction Authority to begin its own inspection and repair program.

We demanded that only school buildings that met the criteria outlined in the safety checklist be allowed to open for blended learning. Over 20 schools and campuses didn’t reach that threshold were not re-opened for in-person learning in September.

In addition to physical safety requirements for school buildings, the UFT’s health and safety agreement with the administration included a multipronged approach to COVID-19 testing for school communities.

New York City agreed to a mandatory randomized monthly testing program of every school community and to increased voluntary testing of school staff, students and neighborhoods in ZIP codes where COVID-19 infection rates were rising, a protection that would prove extremely valuable.

Ultimately, the UFT and principals’ union negotiated a phased-in return of our staff and students into school buildings, granting us time to evaluate every building’s level of readiness and gauge the nimbleness of the city's COVID-19 testing programs.

School buildings opened on September 8 for educators, administrators and staff to plan for blended learning. Student instruction began on September 16 fully remote, and then a phased-in approach for in-person instructed started by grade level. First, students enrolled in 3K, Pre-K, and District 75 returned to school on September 21; then all elementary school students enrolled in K-12, K-5, K-8, K-2, and K-3 schools returned on September 29; and finally, middle- and high-school students returned on October 1.

Every step of the way, UFT leadership and staff were present to conduct and certify building and classroom inspections. We even had a hotline set up for educators to call if an issue popped up, and much to our surprise, we did not experience a spike in complaints. Our careful and expert-guided planning paid, and continues to pay, dividends.

Blended learning model for health and safety

Ensuring our school buildings were safe to reopen was one task, the other was to devise a plan that granted educators and families enough flexibility to minimize the spread of the virus. This called for creating a scheduling plan: some students learn remotely full time; other students report to school for in-person learning on certain days of the week and learn remotely on other days, known as blended learning; and remote and in-person classroom staffing takes into consideration the medical needs of educators and school staff.

Since the summer, families have had the opportunity to have their students opt into full-time remote learning and can do so at any time during the academic year.

As for educators, at first, only those with a medical accommodation were allowed to teach remotely full time, which comprised about 23% of the workforce. Since then, a new agreement, signed with the administration on September 28, allows for educators living with family members at higher risk of COVID-19 complications to receive priority for available remote positions. In addition, the agreement allows educators with no on-site duties because, for example, all of their students learn remotely full time, to request to perform their work remotely as well. The change was driven by social distancing concerns with the goal of reducing the number of people in school buildings at any one time.

Managing emerging hotspots

Our current struggle with the pandemic as it affects our student’s public education is the increasing infection rates in neighborhoods across Brooklyn and Queens. During the last week of September into the first week of October, nine ZIP codes in Brooklyn and Queens had daily infection rates above 3%, with some above 8%. Public schools are not islands, they are a part of their communities; we feared that keeping those school buildings open would only add fuel to the spread of the virus.

Out of an abundance of caution, we worked with the administration and the governor to have 91 schools spread over 108 buildings in the concerning ZIP codes switch to full-time remote instruction on Tuesday, October 6 for an initial period of 14 days. These schools and ZIP codes are considered to be in a new “red zone” classification. After the state further analyzed their granular testing data, the governor made an announcement that another 33 schools spread over 45 buildings in communities adjacent to the original nine ZIP codes would also switch to full-time remote instruction for an initial 14-day period starting October 8. These additional schools and neighborhoods are considered to be in the new “orange zone” classification. The state will reevaluate these schools and their surrounding communities after their initial 14-day period of full-time remote instruction, in order to determine whether their buildings are ready to reopen again.

In addition to temporarily closing the school buildings in the red and orange zones, new restrictions were imposed in the identified neighborhoods and supplementary resources were deployed to hold community residents accountable for wearing masks and to encourage them to maintain social distance and get tested. Fortunately, the daily infection rates in the identified red zones have stabilized this week and the first days of the mandated random testing, and the ongoing voluntary testing of school communities show the virus has not spread into the public schools tested.

Following this experience, the governor has now also mandated 14 days of COVID-19 testing for staff and students in schools that are in neighborhoods outside of the orange zone that remain open. These neighborhoods and schools fall into the new “yellow zone” classification.

Mandatory randomized monthly testing program update

While we worked to control the flare ups in Brooklyn and Queens, the mandatory randomized monthly testing program stipulated in the district plan, as amended by our efforts, started on October 9. The administration contracted BioReference Laboratories, Fulgent Genetics, and SOMOS Community Care to randomly test on a monthly basis a percentage of individuals, including staff and students, in every school. Test results are expected to be returned to tested staff within 48 hours and families will receive results for their students who are randomly tested.

More specifically on the percentage of a school that is tested randomly every month:

• 20% of the individuals in schools with fewer than 500 students;
• 15% of the individuals in schools with 500 to 999 students;
• 10% of the individuals in schools with more than 1,000 students.

On October 9, there were 58 schools selected for randomized testing, and starting on October 13 somewhere between 70 and 90 schools each weekday are participating. Results from the first round of testing conducted on October 9 found only one positive case out of 1,751 tests conducted, effectively showing a 0.06% positivity rate.

Challenges

As a city, we have worked hard to protect our students, educators and staff, and by extension, to keep their families and communities safe. Schools have adequate supplies, a nurse has been hired for every school building, vents and HVAC systems have been evaluated, and our randomized monthly testing program is up and running. Regardless of the neighborhood infection rate, medical experts are telling us that the virus has thus far not seeped into our buildings, and we are succeeding in our primary responsibility to keep our students, staff, and their families out of harm’s way.

We now have to give this same level of focus and resources to support our academic programs. To improve in-person instruction, the administration agreed to redeploy 2,000 educators and hire an additional 4,500 teachers to fill in the shortage of educators needed for in-person instruction, given the restrictions on class size needed to maintain social distance. To improve remote instruction, the administration agreed to identify proven masters of remote instruction as Virtual Content Specialists and task them with creating academic content and materials that enhance remote instruction for students and at the same time support educators teaching remotely full time.

We have received few updates on the hiring process for these positions and urge you to put pressure on the administration before this develops into an untenable situation.

Closing thoughts

I would like to thank Chairpersons Mark Treyger and Mark Levine for hosting this incredibly important hearing on the reopening of our public schools for the 2020-21 academic year as it relates to the health and safety of students, staff and families during the COVID-19 pandemic. I also want to personally thank the members of the New York City Council for their support during this difficult time. I want to applaud our individual school communities for all of their efforts to ensure that our buildings are safe and that they meet all of the health standards prescribed by our public health experts. We are the only major school district in the country offering in-person instruction this fall, and most importantly, we have done so in a way that has kept our city’s infection rate low. Now, let's turn that same degree of focus and financial investment to improving both remote instruction and in-person learning during this pandemic. We owe our students nothing less.