NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Mayor Bill de Blasio toured the Bronx Collaborative High School on Wednesday, reassuring parents and faculty workers that schools are safe to open on Sept. 10.
As part of the city’s initiative to check ventilation systems in schools throughout the city, the mayor and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza toured the Bronx school to inspect windows and air flow.
“Hundreds of schools have already passed,” the mayor stressed. “We’re going to continue to give you updates day by day as to how many schools have been checked and ready to go.”
Lu Bonet, a parents with three children in public school, introduced de Blasio at his news conference and said she was excited that her kids would soon be able to return to their classrooms.
“If you’ve been to the beach, if you've been to a lot of places, the supermarket, I think our kids to be able to go at least in the building,” she said.
Mayor de Blasio agrees and says he and Carranza saw the changes a ventilation team had made to a classroom, which will now only seat nine students.
“That classroom is gonna have nine students in it under the plan for reopening, and I asked the principal, ‘What number students would have been that in a normal time?’ He said between 24 and 28 students,” the mayor said.
The Bronx high school will also be using some of it’s recreation field for classes, as will many others across the city.
Mayor de Blasio says it’s up to each school on how they want to reopen: “We’re saying to each principal, ‘What do you want to do? What do you want to do, how can we help you do it?’”
The mayor notes that school officials have been working on the reopening plan since June 3 and if problems occur, they will quickly address them.