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‘It doesn’t make sense:’ Faction of NYC teachers concerned with opening schools amid COVID spike

Some teachers in the city are calling for schools to go fully remote as the coronavirus positivity rate continues to increase across the boroughs.

News 12 Staff

Jan 4, 2021, 1:17 PM

Updated 1,430 days ago

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Some teachers in the city are calling for schools to go fully remote as the coronavirus positivity rate continues to increase across the boroughs.
A faction of the United Federation of Teachers known as The Solidarity Caucus says they have fears that the virus will be brought back to schools due to the post-holiday surge.
They say with the city’s positivity rates surpassing 9%, students should be kept fully remote.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” says Quinn Zannoni, a member of The Solidarity Caucus. “Why we would expose people, staff and all the community in the school to such high levels of infection.”
The threshold to set off a schoolwide shutdown is also 9%, but the state calculates its numbers differently and it is more than 2.5% lower than the city’s.
The United Federation of Teachers issued a statement, saying in part: “Our experience so far has been that the actual infection rate in schools has been very small, including in hard-hit neighborhoods, but we will be monitoring results closely as in-school testing begins again.”
Students in 3K to fifth grade, including District 75 schools, are heading back to the classroom today.
High school students are still fully remote.