New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio insisted Monday that it's up to him and schools Chancellor Richard Carranza to have the final say about keeping the city's schools closed after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday that the decision is his to make and it's too soon to make that announcement.
“We’re not reopening our schools,” the mayor told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." “It won’t be safe for all the people we’re supposed to protect, and our job, our responsibility is to them.”
De Blasio had announced the closings on Saturday, but Cuomo pushed back on Sunday, saying that schools won't open "one minute sooner than they should be opened," but also won't be opened "one minute later than they should be," reports The New York Times.
The mayor said he respects Cuomo, but his job is to protect children, families, and educators in New York City.
"There's no way we can bring back schools in a productive way that would help our kids' education," said de Blasio. "By the time you came back, it'd be almost time to go again. I made very clear, you know, I run the schools, along with the chancellor, under the system we have here."
De Blasio and Cuomo have had several disagreements in the past, but Monday, the mayor said they have agreed "on the vast majority of things" where the coronavirus outbreak is concerned.
"There's a lot of communication between our teams," he said. "If you look at crisis dynamics, New York City and New York state have been consistently on the same page, except for a few times. We worked those times out."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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