Sorry, Honey, the Government Closed Your School

New York’s rules for shutting down preschools are bad for families—and bad for New York.

Courtesy Deb Cohn-Orbach/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

We walked our daughter to preschool a few weeks ago and were turned away at the door. The New York City Department of Health had shut down the school while it investigated an incident.

The week before, staff left a three-year-old at the local park and did not notice he was missing until they returned to the school for a headcount. A teacher immediately went back for him, but the child had already spent ten minutes alone in the park.

No one was harmed. The school found the child, told the parents, and reported the incident to the city.

This was a scary situation, and it deserves serious investigation. We’re happy that the state is investigating, and that it sent a formal notice to all parents notifying us of the incident. But we’re unhappy that the state closed our school during the investigation, which might take more than a month.

Consider what a month means for families like ours. Preschool is not a service you pause like a streaming subscription; it’s one of the central institutions of a young family’s life. It holds most of our daughter’s daily relationships, and teachers that we trust. In practice, a month of school closure means that some families might disenroll and our daughter never see those friends again.

In response to the closure, the parents in our school chat are enrolling their kids into any summer camps that will take them at the last minute. Last week, we dropped our daughter off at a camp that we didn’t have time to tour or reference-check nearly as much as we’d have liked. At drop off, half the kids in the camp were crying, and none of the teachers greeted our daughter. This made a huge contrast with the love and respect she receives from her regular teachers in her preschool, which we toured months before enrolling her and weighed against several other options.

Are our daughter and her friends safer at her regular preschool? The school made a major mistake, yes, but it has otherwise consistently been a positive and safe environment. Or are they safer at unvetted summer camps, or with nannies whom parents found last-minute via a Facebook group?

Just weeks ago, we would walk our daughter home, and she would sing to herself: happy mama, happy daddy, happy baby. Since the school closed, she’s been more prone to tantrums; she misses her regular routine. What are we supposed to tell her? “Sorry, honey, the government shut down your school, for your own good?”

We wondered why, in our entire public school childhoods, our schools never shut down. They remained open despite occasionally dealing with profound tragedies—not just losing a child for ten minutes, but sometimes losing kids permanently to murder and suicide.

In New York, schools and childcare for children under age six operate under the Department of Health, rather than the Department of Education. This means they have a different set of rules for closures. Closing a public elementary school, middle school, or high school requires an educational impact statement (EIS), a public hearing held 30 to 45 days after the EIS is filed, and a vote. The Health Department, on the other hand, can close a preschool on the spot—“without further proceedings,” as the city Health Code puts it—based on a 17-item checklist of conditions, including failure to provide “competent line of sight supervision of all the children at all times.”

The public school approach seems much more reasonable to us for handling one-off violations that don’t appear to be part of a larger pattern.

This is where the city’s new Commission on Government Efficiency should come in. Government efficiency should mean valuing people’s time. An efficient government would investigate a no-harm incident, hold a hearing, and make a decision in a few days, not a month. And if the process must take weeks, then absent a truly egregious, present danger, parents should be allowed to decide for themselves whether to keep sending their kids to the school in the meantime. I’m an adult. I read the official incident report from the health department—it’s sent to all parents by law. And I know my daughter’s school. Let me weigh the risk myself.

I used to wonder, abstractly, why any family would give up everything New York offers. I don’t wonder anymore. The city should understand that policies like this one—under which childcare can disappear overnight without warning—are exactly the kind of repeated blows that finally convince a family to pack up and leave. And each one takes their taxes, their business, and their love for this city with them.

We are not writing this to complain, and we are not leaving—yet. We are writing because this is exactly the kind of situation a government that promises change should change. We have a coalition to improve housing regulations so that more people can live in our great city. It’s time for the same kind of regulatory reform to help more of “New York’s Cutest” and their families stay in our city.