The return of five-to-eleven-year-olds marked the second stage of a phased reopening-pre-K and some special-needs students returned to schools last week middle- and high-school students will go back on Thursday-though to call it a “full” reopening, as Mayor Bill de Blasio has in recent weeks, is something of a misnomer. Some rushed jubilantly toward their classmates, while others solemnly maintained a perimeter of personal space. Kids, masked, greeted their teachers with pantomimed high-fives. Parents and caretakers, queuing for drop-off (their times staggered, at most schools, to avoid crowding), stood atop social-distancing markers-yellow lines painted on the pavement outside of one school building, yellow stars at another, blue “X”s of electrical tape on the sidewalk at a third. This time, by comparison, the activity was sparse and subdued. The streets of the East Village, a neighborhood with one of the highest densities of primary schools in the city, would in any other year be a snarl of yellow buses, and sidewalks and schoolyards would reverberate with operatic shouts and shrieks of greeting.
It wasn’t technically the first day of school-the beginning of the academic year took place remotely-and in many ways it didn’t feel like one. On Tuesday, after seven months of closure due to the coronavirus pandemic, and two reopening delays, New York City’s public elementary schools welcomed students back inside their buildings.
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