With infection and death rates soaring, bodies stacking up faster than they could be buried and public hospitals overflowing even as armories, gyms and Manhattan’s first homeless shelter were converted into sick bays, the city’s health commissioner made a bold decision: Schools would stay open.
So as Los Angeles closed its system for an “enforced vacation” and attendance in Chicago plummeted, students in New York went to school as usual, with classes kept separate from each other.
They are “better off in school, under supervision, than playing about in the streets,” the commissioner explained, while his 8-year-old son was stricken with the virus.
Adults need to feed their families and their kids need to be in the modern and sanitary conditions the city can provide, he said, “under the constant guardianship of the medical inspectors” with school physicians checking students each morning and sending sick ones home where school nurses and Health Department inspectors visited them.
The nation’s biggest, densest city — which also kept businesses including movie theaters open on staggered schedules — stayed the course and saw its way through a plague that killed 675,000 Americans with a much lower death rate than other big cities. It was perhaps the culminating triumph of the progressive era that saw education regimented, systematized and prioritized, with vast resources poured into modern new buildings with good ventilation as urban enrollment soared.
That’s no fairy tale of New York, but what happened when the “Spanish flu” hit in 1918 and Health Commissioner Royal S. Copeland, backed by Mayor John Hyland, rose to the occasion — two Tammany Hall regulars stepping up to see the city through one of the city’s darkest hours.
That’s a stark contrast to Bill de Blasio’s debacle in 2020, with an overwhelmed and unimaginative mayor wresting control from his Health Department while prioritizing message control over mission control. Friday, de Blasio insisted that reopening schools was a “greater challenge than anyone foresaw,” which any principal could tell you is a flat-out lie.
The truth is that the mayor and his second-choice, second-rate schools chancellor — who’s shown more public passion for challenging the admissions standards at a handful of elite public high schools than he has for reopening the full system — failed to meet the moment, shaking the confidence of parents, principals and teachers in Tweed’s ability to fulfill the basic mission of the public schools.
Our “leaders” have passively overseen this self-inflicted disaster, after de Blasio vowed to make New York the only big city school system in America to physically reopen for the start of the school year.