Starting Monday, many of New Haven’s students will go back to school, virtually, through the district’s new online learning system designed to keep kids in class during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mayor Justin Elicker and top city officials made that announcement Saturday afternoon during their daily coronavirus-related press briefing held via the Zoom online video-conferencing app.
New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) Instructional Superintendent Paul Whyte said that the district has distributed 6,500 Internet-connected devices during the crisis to students who don’t have them so that teachers can resume instruction on Monday.
Not every student in the district will start the distance learning on Monday, he said. At some schools, online learning will be available for students as young as fourth grade, while at others, the youngest members of New Haven’s web classrooms will be middle schoolers.
“It’s not going to be perfect but we’re going to continue to work on the rollout of this,” Whyte said. He said the district will continue to monitor who is not participating in the distance learning to try to make sure everyone gains access.
“We want to make sure we are capturing all of our students one way or another. We’ll be checking in to see who we’re not connecting with so that we can use our youth and family engagement workers to help contact students,” said Whyte (pictured).
Chief Operating Officer Michael Pinto also said during the press briefing said that a custodian employed by the city’s public school district has tested positive for the novel coronavirus.
He said the worker has not been in any New Haven school buildings in the last two weeks, and just got positive test results on Saturday. He said the employee is a Wallingford resident and is currently hospitalized.
Mayor Elicker during the press briefing.
Other updates from Saturday’s press briefing included:
• Elicker renewed his pleas to residents to stop congregating in city parks. He said the city has received continued complaints about groups gathering in parks and on playgrounds. “We’ve been reluctant to be heavy handed in this,” he said of enforcing social distancing in parks. He said that usually people disperse when a police officer shows up and tells them to. But if the problem persists, the city might need to find other ways of keeping people away from each other.
“We’ve been exploring other ways to disincentivize people from gathering and if this continues to be a problem we may have to find other ways to escalate,” he said.
• Elicker reported that the city now has 54 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, though he said the real total is almost certainly much higher. Many people who have the virus have not been tested, contributing to artificially low totals, and there is a lag in the case reports that the city receives.
In the last few weeks there have been differences between the case numbers Elicker reports in his daily briefings and those the state publishes on its website. Health Director Maritza Bond said the discrepancies are due to a lag in reporting to the city, which is complicated by the fact that some residents get tested outside of New Haven and lab results have to come from a number of different sources. She said New Haven is working with Yale-New Haven Hospital to get live data, which will help the city report accurate totals faster.
• Elicker did not heap any more shame at the base of Yale’s ivory tower as he did on Friday, though he praised the University of New Haven for finding a way to answer his plea to free up dorm space for first responders who don’t want to get their families sick. “Generally in times of crisis we’re looking for everyone not to find ways to say, ‘No,’ but to find ways to say, ‘Yes,’” he said.
Soon after the press briefing ended, Yale announced that it would offer up 300 beds to New Haven’s first responders.
Elicker said he had also “been in pretty active conversations” with President Joe Bertolino of Southern Connecticut State University about how the local state university can support the city during this pandemic. “I understand the state is looking at universities around the state also for support in this effort,” he said.
• Elicker also responded to a few questions about Donald Trump’s recent tweet in which the president said he is considering an “enforceable quarantine” for New York and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut. “People need to stay away from each other as much as they can,” Elicker said, adding that in practice, a quarantine would bring about a number of unforeseen challenges and would need to be implemented very carefully.