Bill de blasio claims NYC is on track to hire thousands of new teachers

Mayor Bill de Blasio has refused to say how many teachers he has hired of the 4,500 needed to reopen classrooms next week, after the first day of remote classes was plagued by technical difficulties.

More than one million New York City students returned to school on Monday through remote-learning, following weeks of delays and confusion over the city’s reopening plan.  

Only Pre-K and some special education students ended a six-month absence from school buildings and returned to the classroom at select schools. 

Meanwhile, those who started classes online kicked off the school year with delays glitches after the online student portal crashed for several minutes at the start of the day. 

De Blasio has come under fire by parents and residents over his handling of students’ return to school which was postponed several times after the city failed to commit to a safe learning model amid the pandemic in time. 

Kindergarten through fifth grade schools and grade 5-8 schools are now due to resume in-person learning next Tuesday, while high school students will return on Thursday, October 1.

De Blasio previously said a staffing shortage was one of the major issues driving the latest delay and announced the Department of Education is hiring an additional 2,500 teachers on top of the 2,000 he said were being added earlier last week.  

During a press conference on Tuesday, the mayor responded to questions regarding concerns over the teacher shortage and whether the city will be able to hire enough staff on time. 

‘We’ve had until now, a changing situation in terms of the number of teachers available, the numbers of students available,’ de Blasio said. 

‘It has caused some real challenges in getting the numbers right, but what we saw in the last few days is that we surged a certain number of personnel to make sure the needs were filled.’

The mayor explained the city is planning to apply the same model used at Pre-K schools this week when reopening elementary schools and high schools next week.

He did not specify how many teachers of 2,500 need that have been hired, but said the numbers are now ‘coming in much stronger.’ 

‘There’s confidence those numbers are coming forward in the way we need them to. There’s a lot of people looking for work,’ the mayor said.    

‘What we are finding is, the thousands of educators who now work at the DOE, who are certified, ready to go, who were working at other jobs not in classrooms – they’re moving into the classroom. That’s working smoothly. 

‘The substitute pool is over 5,000, who are already certified – they’re moving into place.’ 

‘We’re finding more and more teachers who have taught previously and want to come back into the profession. Young people planning to be teachers in the middle of their degree programs – there’s a lot of different pieces here.’ 

De Blasio said the Department of Education is also looking at adjunct professors at CUNY schools who have been laid off and are now looking for work in lower education. 

When asked about how many teachers he was aiming to hire, de Blasio admitted there ‘isn’t yet a final number’. 

‘[W]hat we found out in the previous dynamics was there was so much complexity going on that we had to cut through it and get the numbers right, case by case, school by school and that process clearly needed work,’ he said. 

‘And now what I saw going into yesterday was it had finally aligned the way we needed it to, and remember originally we had hoped to be up and running September 10th, 11 days later 1,800 sites up and the staffing was right.

‘It was proven now on a large scale, that same model is going to work for next Tuesday and next Thursday, we got a lot of work to do, but we finally have the design we need to do it.’ 

The mayor proudly claimed the city was ‘off to a really strong start’ with yesterday’s reopening, but did not mention the technical glitches experienced by remote learners.  

The Department of Education on Monday took to Twitter to address the website’s crash around 9am, shortly after millions of students logged on for class. 

‘The DOE login page was down for 10 min around 9am, which may have affected Zoom, TeachHub, email, & other platforms. We were back in business within minutes & we’re continuing to keep an eye on it. Families who have any other issues can submit a ticket,’ officials said on Twitter. 

Angry New Yorkers responded to the tweet, with some claiming the system had been down for longer. 

‘SSO was down a lot earlier and longer than that! Didn’t expect a million kids to be logging on at the same time?,’ user Jocelyn Fung said. 

‘I mean, it’s not like this hasn’t happened before,’ tweeted another user while sharing a screenshot of the offline student portal from last week.   

Kate Polson, whose children are first grade and kindergarten students, told Gothamist her kids were unable to log on to class for the first minutes of the day because the link to the virtual classroom did not work. 

‘None of the families could get online, and so then it took another five minutes after that for that to be resolved by the teachers. And so that was 15 minutes late for everyone to be able to get it on the site,’ she said. 

‘And then there were minor technical issues while we were on the video stream. The teacher didn’t know how to make her sound when she was streaming a video; hadn’t figured out how to make the sound go through to all the students. So we had to sort of work around that.’ 

On Monday, de Blasio’s Twitter was immediately inundated with calls to resign from angry New Yorkers. 

‘First lesson of the school year: Resign,’ one tweeted. 

Another said: ‘Teachers and principals are going above and beyond. You should be ashamed of yourself. Just resign.’ 

The rate of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations plunged after an April peak and has largely flattened this summer across the state: New York has seen an average of 1% of daily tests coming up positive since June.