On Wednesday, two additional public schools in New York City were closed due to concerns about swine flu. Students at a school that lost an assistant principal to the disease were also instructed to stay away longer than originally planned. These closures bring the total number of city public and private schools shut down within the last week due to flu fears to at least 23.
The most recent closures affect P.S. 242, an elementary school in Queens where 10 students showed flu symptoms in the past three days, and P.S. 130, another elementary school in Queens where 12 students and 23 staff members fell ill. P.S. 130 also accommodates approximately 70 students from a special education school called P.S. 993.I.S. 238, the school where Mitchell Wiener, the assistant principal who died from swine flu, worked, is set to reopen to students on Tuesday instead of Friday as initially planned. However, teachers will still return on Friday. The city Health Department has not provided an immediate explanation for the decision to bring teachers back first.
During the funeral of Mitchell Wiener, mourners paid their respects to the administrator, who had been known for his dedication to students. Wiener had been teaching at the Queens school since 1978. Student Jeffery Grey expressed his sadness and feeling of loss at Wiener’s passing. The funeral highlighted the frustration of Wiener’s family, who claimed that the city should have closed the school earlier. Some parents in the city also questioned the timing and scale of school closures.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden defended the city’s approach of deciding whether to close each public school on a case-by-case basis. Education officials released attendance rates on Wednesday, which revealed that one school that stayed open had an attendance rate as low as 39 percent. However, officials cautioned against interpreting high absenteeism as an indication of a flu outbreak, as many parents are keeping their children at home out of fear.
Amid the anxieties surrounding the virus, more than half of the city’s schools still had 90 percent or more of their students attending classes on Wednesday. In Queens, a tent was set up at the Queens Hospital Center as a field triage unit to handle concerned parents seeking reassurance, rather than a surge of sick patients. As of now, there have been 201 confirmed cases of swine flu in New York City out of a total of 299 statewide. The Levittown school district on Long Island also announced the closure of 12 schools on Thursday due to flu concerns.
