35
April 1, 2022 • Schneps Media
A look
back
BY ISABEL SONG BEER
March 15 marked the two-year anniversary
of when the New York City
public school system shut down due
to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since then, school as we know it
has completely changed with leaders
implementing remote learning as well
as mask and vaccine mandates once
schools reopened.
As the anniversary drew near, charter
school leaders reflected on the herculean
struggles of maintaining functioning educational
centers that continued to challenge
and teach while still ensuring the
safety of students and faculty.
“We were the first New York City elementary
schools to reopen our doors
in person, full-time, five days a week in
August 2020,” said Emily Kim, founder
and CEO of Zeta Charter Schools. “We
ran our full-time in person school model
as well as a full-time remote model
to accommodate families who really
needed us to open. So that included children
with special needs, English Language
Learners (ELL) and children of
essential workers.”
Schools had shifted to a remote learning
model on March 23, 2020 and it was
important to accommodate the needs
of guardians as well as students, Kim
said, because not everyone had the immediate
availability of safe, reliable and
affordable childcare.
It was also important to ensure trust between
school administrators and families
during such a tumultuous time.
“All of us were just in a state of fear and
not fully understanding what was going
to happen and what the future held with
respect to COVID, and there were no
vaccines on the horizon at that time,” said
Kim. “We really had to spend a lot of time
deepening the relationships we had with
our families and also communicating at a
very high level with a lot of transparency
with our staff.”
However, by November of 2020 schools
CHARTER SCHOOLS
were forced to shut down and adopt the
remote learning model once again after
just 8-weeks of instruction due to a rise
of cases.
“There’s the lesson of obviously being
prepared for anything and being flexible
and I think it certainly showed the genius
of the charter model whereby these
groups could make decisions quickly and
act with great agility in the face of everchanging
circumstances,” said James Merriman,
CEO of the New York City Charter
Center. “Everyone learned that the
schools that had built strong relationships
with their communities – meaning parents
and students – were much more able to
use that trust to ensure that parents were
ready to help out with remote learning.”
Now two years down the road with the
mandatory mask mandate lifted in New
York schools, educational leaders have
a much better understanding of how to
quickly adapt and effectively educate
their students regardless of dire circumstances
like possible future variants or
other emergencies.
“We have to be able to manage COVID,”
Kim said. “Schools are managing
every manner of illness every single day.
I think we’ve reached a point where we
know how to manage COVID. If there
were an outbreak we would certainly require
masking, and we can act very nimbly.
There’s still fear and trepidation, but I
think also Omicron taught us that we can
deal with another variant. We now know
what to do.”
REUTERS/ANDREW KELLY
Children are seen walking, on the first day of lifting the indoor mask mandate for DOE schools between K through 12, in Manhattan,
March 7, 2022.
Charter school
leaders reflect on
two years of COVID
Two arts-rich public K-5 schools in
Manhattan
Afterschool Available
212-533-2743 212-964-3792