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#NYC’s school closing makes zero sense

#NYC’s school closing makes zero sense

Zero point two percent: That’s the rate at which people in the city’s public-school system have tested positive for the coronavirus. That’s two in every thousand tests — and it includes quite a few students and school staff who are all-remote, meaning they didn’t get the bug at school.

All the science shows in-person schooling is not at all a significant COVID-19 spreader for kids or adults, especially through 6th grade or so. High-risk teachers can easily get exempted from having to come in. Meanwhile, kids through at least 3rd grade have far more trouble getting any benefit from remote classes — and a parent or other adult has to practically sit with them the whole time. On top of that, online “learning” is even tougher for lower-income families.

Yet Mayor de Blasio has closed all his schools simply because (by the city’s measure, not the state’s), Gotham hit a seven-day rolling average positive rate above 3 percent. Restaurants and bars, gyms and barbershops all remain open; closing the schools first makes no sense at all.

Which is why private and Catholic school buildings, outside de Blasio’s direct control, remain open.

Meanwhile, New Yorkers are busy mingling at secret sex parties and raves in Queens, Brooklyn and The Bronx, as well as a massive maskless ultra-Orthodox wedding. Not to mention the not-at-all-secret protests, with a total lack of social distancing that the politicians barely wave a finger at. Yet all that misbehavior has barely gotten the Big Apple to the 3 percent positive rate that de Blasio cited as cause to shut down all his schools.

Heck, United Federation of Teachers boss Mike Mulgrew — who actually insisted on the 3 percent rule back when he was agreeing to let any schools reopen in September — wrote his members Sunday in support of reopening schools in neighborhoods with low positivity rates. “We are going to ask the mayor to consider a regional approach,” he claims. “We don’t think the whole system has to go remote if large areas of the city have kept transmission rates low.”

Gov. Cuomo likewise called for a school-by-school approach, before going along with de Blasio’s total shutdown.

If Mulgrew isn’t just playing games, he should unilaterally OK most school reopenings next week. Indeed, de Blasio should announce it and dare the union chief to do yet another 180.

This “one size fits all” standard is beyond senseless. The mayor has no excuse for sticking to it.

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