Tale of two cities – to close or not to close schools?
What would you do if you were a superintendent of a school district with hundreds of thousands of children – actually any number of children – and received a bomb threat that you weren’t 100 percent sure was a hoax?
And the threat came less than 10 days after the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11?
In Los Angeles, Superintendent Ramon Cortines chose the “err on the side of caution” route, and shut down the nation’s second-largest school system for a day on Tuesday, despite the inconvenience imposed on tens of thousands of parents and over 600,000 students.
“I am not taking the chance of bringing children any place, into any part of the building, until I know it is safe,” he declared.
Meanwhile, on the East Coast, where New York City school officials received a similar threat the same day, they chose to do nothing.
The nation’s largest school system, with more than 1 million students, stayed open.
Mayor Bill DeBlasio said the letter his city received was “so generic, so outlandish, and posed to numerous school systems simultaneously. Kids should be in school today. We will be vigilant. But we are absolutely convinced our schools are safe.”
In a swipe at L.A., New York City police chief William Bratton said the decision to close the L.A. schools was “a significant overreaction.” “We cannot allow ourselves to raise levels of fear,” he said.
Lest anyone think that this was an East Coast-West Coast thing – New York bluster vs. California compassion – Cortines is no stranger to New York: in fact he was once chancellor of the New York City schools. And Bratton was police chief in Los Angeles for nearly a decade.
Maybe Los Angeles officials were understandably more jittery than New York officials after the mass killings in San Bernardino – which took place less Tale of two cities – to close or not to close schools? | EdSource:
