As many as 40,000 students at 65 public schools that are unusable because of severe damage from Hurricane Sandy will not resume classes Monday as planned, city officials said yesterday.
Instead, those students will be rerouted to school buildings left unscathed by the storm — but not until Wednesday.
School officials said the delay is necessary because of significant challenges posed by the situation — including the need to create new routes for a host of yellow buses and to figure out how to share space in buildings that are suddenly serving multiple schools.
Schools are not in session Tuesday because many serve as polling sites for the election.
“Wednesday, I do expect challenges. I mean, that’s seriously going to be a challenging day,” said Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott. “Those challenges will [be] lessening over a period of time.”
The remainder of the city’s 1 million public school kids will come back to school Monday, following an entire week off.
This includes students at eight large high schools that have been and will continue serving as evacuation centers from the storm — although city officials said they’d keep track of concerns about safety and cleanliness in those buildings.
At one of the eight sites, Graphic Communication Arts HS in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, residents broke toilets by stuffing clothes down them and left human feces under a cafeteria table.
On Staten Island, Tottenville HS is being used as both a methadone clinic and an animal hospital, according to a source.
“There’s no way this building can be ready for students by Monday,” United Federation of Teachers representative Alice O’Neil said after touring Graphic Communications Arts HS. “It’s not sanitary.”