{"id":143467,"date":"2026-02-24T03:51:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T03:51:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/143467\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T03:51:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T03:51:13","slug":"city-schools-to-reopen-tuesday-over-some-objections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/143467\/","title":{"rendered":"City schools to reopen Tuesday, over some objections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mayor Zohran Mamdani addressed New York City public school students directly at his Monday afternoon storm briefing, announcing he had \u201csome tough news to share.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSchool will be in-person tomorrow,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can still pelt me with snowballs when you see me.\u201d<\/p>\n

What You Need To Know<\/p>\n

New York City public school children enjoyed their first true snow day since 2019 on Monday, but city schools were set to reopen Tuesday
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Some parents and elected officials objected, saying some neighborhoods needed more time to make roads safe and passable
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Staten Island Catholic schools will remain closed, while Brooklyn and Queens Catholic schools will conduct remote learning<\/p>\n

Indeed, snowballs and sledding were officially sanctioned activities Monday as the city opted not to conduct remote learning<\/a>, as it did during last month\u2019s snowstorm.<\/p>\n

City officials said the biggest factor was the snowstorm landing at the end of the weeklong winter break.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou 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,\u201d the mayor told NY1 in an interview<\/a> Monday. “And we also didn\u2019t have students leaving their schools with their devices as we typically do in anticipation of snowfall.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d Mamdani said. \u201cThe reason we applied for that waiver is that this was a confluence of events \u2014 you might call it a perfect storm.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In a statement, the City Council\u2019s Republican members wrote: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

City officials said public schools will be ready.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe made sure we deployed all 8,000 employees to make sure that we\u2019re clearing every bit of our school property across our 1,400 physical properties,\u201d Kevin Moran, the acting deputy chancellor for operations, said. \u201cWe 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\u2019re down to asphalt and concrete sidewalks at every school.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Zohran Mamdani addressed New York City public school students directly at his Monday afternoon storm briefing, announcing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[203,109,25,3284,67,9,24,55,54,12,56,87,27,200],"class_list":{"0":"post-143467","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-app-education","9":"tag-app-local-state-politics","10":"tag-app-top-stories","11":"tag-bobby-cuza","12":"tag-education","13":"tag-new-york","14":"tag-new-york-city","15":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","16":"tag-new-york-city-news","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-ny","19":"tag-politics","20":"tag-top-stories","21":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}