Mayor Zohran Mamdani addressed New York City public school students directly at his Monday afternoon storm briefing, announcing he had “some tough news to share.”

“School will be in-person tomorrow,” he said. “You can still pelt me with snowballs when you see me.”

What You Need To Know

New York City public school children enjoyed their first true snow day since 2019 on Monday, but city schools were set to reopen Tuesday

Some parents and elected officials objected, saying some neighborhoods needed more time to make roads safe and passable

Staten Island Catholic schools will remain closed, while Brooklyn and Queens Catholic schools will conduct remote learning

Indeed, snowballs and sledding were officially sanctioned activities Monday as the city opted not to conduct remote learning, as it did during last month’s snowstorm.

City officials said the biggest factor was the snowstorm landing at the end of the weeklong winter break.

“You had a lot of students and teachers who were potentially going to be stranded outside of the city as they were trying to come back in for school on Monday,” the mayor told NY1 in an interview Monday. “And we also didn’t have students leaving their schools with their devices as we typically do in anticipation of snowfall.”

Ordinarily, a snow day would require the city to add an extra day of instruction at the end of the school year, but in this case, the state education department granted a waiver.

“The waiver means that the city will not have to pay an upwards of tens-of-millions-of-dollar fine because of the state law requiring 180 days of instruction,” Mamdani said. “The reason we applied for that waiver is that this was a confluence of events — you might call it a perfect storm.”

But the decision to reopen schools Tuesday was not without controversy. A petition to make classes remote attracted tens of thousands of signatures, and several elected officials objected.

In a statement, the City Council’s Republican members wrote: “The decision to open schools for in-person learning tomorrow is hasty and misguided. Many outerborough neighborhoods have been disparately impacted by this storm and, given the sheer volume of snow, need much more time and resources to make roads safe and passable. It is going to be impossible for many students to reach school and for parents to get to work by tomorrow morning, and as a result, there will be mass absenteeism.”

While Catholic schools will be open in Manhattan and the Bronx on Tuesday, those on Staten Island will remain closed. Brooklyn and Queens Catholic schools will conduct remote learning.

City officials said public schools will be ready.

“We made sure we deployed all 8,000 employees to make sure that we’re clearing every bit of our school property across our 1,400 physical properties,” Kevin Moran, the acting deputy chancellor for operations, said. “We definitely know that mass transit tomorrow and our school buses will be up and running, so we anticipate all our students and staff make every effort to get to school tomorrow, but we will make sure we’re down to asphalt and concrete sidewalks at every school.”