After 1 Week, 1 Hell's Kitchen Classroom Closed By COVID-19

HELL'S KITCHEN, NY — As the first week of fully in-person learning since the pandemic comes to a close for New York City's public schools, 126 of the 48,000 classrooms across the city were either fully or partially closed due to coronavirus cases detected in the building.

That number includes at least one classroom in a Hell's Kitchen's school: P.S. 51 Elias Howe, on West 44th Strete between 10th and 11th avenues, where a room was shut down for one week starting on Wednesday, according to the Department of Education's map.

Elsewhere in Midtown, on Friday, the Art and Design High School on east 56th Street near Second Avenue began a non-classroom quarantine — an intervention where a non-classroom staff member like a school secretary tests positive.

In total, 421 classrooms across the five boroughs have been closed down since the first day of school on Monday as the DOE tracked 560 coronavirus cases among students and staff, according to the map. (Some known classroom closures do not appear on the map, however, suggesting the true numbers are higher.)

That number is less than 1 percent of the 65,000 spaces the city is using as classrooms this year. The city typically has around 48,000 classrooms, but added other spaces to help with social distancing, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio.

On Friday, 80 of the classrooms were still closed and 46 were under partial closure, the map shows.

No schools have had to be fully closed down since the start of the school year. Under new policies, entire schools will only be closed this year when there is evidence of "widespread transmission," as determined by the Health Department and Department of Education.

The first week of data comes as New York City welcomed back all 1 million of its public school students to the classroom for the first time since the pandemic struck, bringing all eyes to the ability of the city to deliver on its promise for the "gold standard" of health and safety in the 2021-22 school year.

On Friday, the mayor called the data a "strong start" to the school year.

"This is, thank God, relatively few against the comparison of 65,000 classrooms," the mayor said Friday. "We're seeing low positivity in the testing we're doing so far. It's a strong start."

On top of an intricate plan of vaccine mandates, social distancing and extensive cleaning policies, the city is trying out a new way to address coronavirus cases in schools given vaccine rates among older students.

Students who are vaccinated will be able to stay in their classroom even if a coronavirus case is detected as long as they are asymptomatic, leading to the partial closure of classrooms at the middle and high school level. Unvaccinated students will quarantine at home and can "test back in" to class with a negative test after the seventh day.

In elementary schools, where children are not old enough to get the shot, the entire classroom will quarantine should a positive case be detected.

The mayor has called those rules a conservative approach to stopping the spread of the virus and noted it could change as the school year progresses.

"The standard we're holding right now is conservative," the mayor said Tuesday. "It's something that we have said explicitly we would reconsider depending on how things go over the first few weeks."

Patch reporter Anna Quinn contributed.