NYC school students still eating outdoors as winter arrives

(AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

I hope everyone has had a chance to sit down with their family and friends for a satisfying Thanksgiving meal. Of course, when the holiday break is over, those of you with children will be sending the kids back to school where they will have to deal with the dubious proposition of eating school lunches. That’s fairly typical, but the kids attending New York City schools are facing an additional complicating factor. As the NY Post reports this week, many public schools still have social distancing rules in place because of the pandemic. And one of the requirements for some of them is that they eat outdoors. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, temperatures in New York have been plunging into the 40s on a regular basis and there’s even snow falling occasionally in some areas. Pardon us for asking the obvious question here, but should school children be sitting out in the snow to eat lunch?

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Talk about cold cuts.

Kids in some city schools are still eating lunch outdoors each day due to social distancing rules despite plunging temperatures and steamed parents.

“It’s getting a little ridiculous at this point,” said a mom at MS 104 in Manhattan, where kids again pulled apart their string cheese in 39-degree weather Wednesday. “They’ve eaten outdoors every day this week. It’s cold.”

A mom at a Park Slope elementary school said her child has also been dining al fresco for the entire year and began complaining about the conditions this week.

The mother at Park Slope elementary school who was interviewed for the linked article says that she’s asked the school board about the situation, but was told there are currently “no plans” to end the policy at this time. All of these decisions are being handed down from the teachers’ unions. Has anyone informed them that it’s actually starting to snow?

This is more of the COVID madness that has infected the administrators and staff at our public schools. It’s nearly December. While winter doesn’t technically begin for nearly another month, winter has arrived in the northeast for all intents and purposes. I was stuck in traffic on Tuesday for almost two hours because people forget how to drive in the snow every single year. But at least I was in a vehicle. Are we really going to ask children to sit in the snow while they eat their lunch?

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“It’s already hard enough for a little kid to eat outside while sitting on concrete with a mask on,” said the mother of a Brooklyn fourth-grader who ate outside this week. “What does the weather have to be to go inside? How low does it have to go?”

The parents report that the children in these schools have only been allowed to eat indoors during pouring rainstorms thus far. Light snowfalls have not altered the policy. The school boards contacted for this report claim that all children have been given the option of eating indoors if they follow the masking and distancing policies, but the parents are saying the children knew nothing of that option.

Making matters worse is the fact that none of the teachers and administrators are eating outdoors. The faculty dining areas are still operating indoors as they normally do. Are they wearing masks and social distancing while having their lunch? Nobody seems to be willing to say.

This is more madness being perpetrated by both the pandemic theater that’s sweeping the nation and the teachers’ unions utilizing the health crisis to their own advantage. The parents are the ones paying the taxes that keep those schools functioning. There is no reason that they shouldn’t be able to institute a change to this sort of insantiy.

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