Chancellor Richard Carranza and Mayor Bill de Blasio have plainly, and utterly, lost the trust of the city’s teachers. No wonder the mayor won’t even think about reopening the schools.
The latest fury comes as Carranza’s Department of Education finally started releasing numbers on DOE employees who’ve died from the coronavirus. Yet the list of 50 omitted four deceased school-safety agents, supposedly because they’re on the NYPD payroll though they work in schools,
This, after the DOE spent weeks stonewalling reporters, principals and union officials asking for COVID-19 statistics.
The DOE raised teachers’ ire further with a statement insisting that “the City has been at widespread community transmission for over one month, which means the sources of infections are unknown.”
Sure, some likely caught the bug off school grounds — wouldn’t you want to know if someone who’d worked in your building was infected? One furious United Federation of Teachers chapter leader fumed, “There has been an inexcusable lack of clarity and communication from the DOE since this thing started.”
From the start of the outbreak, Carranza told school leaders not to report COVID-19 cases and do the then-required contact-tracing and closing of buildings for disinfection. And he and the mayor delayed a mass school-shutdown days later than other major-city systems, until the governor brow-beat them into it.
Veteran city politician Sal Albanese says de Blasio and Carranza have “blood on their hands” for forcing school staff to keep showing up, and you can be sure many agree.
And even as they resisted facing the truth about the threat, Carranza & Co. failed to prepare at all for remote learning — leaving school staff and students to catch up, with the DOE even switching software on the fly.
Teachers feel totally betrayed, convinced that the mayor and chancellor endangered them needlessly — and still refuse to level with them.
Nothing can make up for that.