What Are Your Rights? Attending School Amid a Global Health Crisis

Man: The following segment is sponsored by Martin, Harding & Mazzotti.

Interviewer: A recent photograph of a school in Georgia with its hallways tightly packed full of students went viral for failure to properly social distance and require face coverings. That school is now closed after a number of students and staff tested positive for COVID-19. Now this past week, Governor Cuomo, he announced that schools in New York would be allowed to reopen in the coming months, but will they and what will that look like? Here to help discuss how this will affect our viewers is supervising attorney Dan Dagostino from the law firm of Martin, Harding & Mazzotti. Dan, thanks so much for joining us this afternoon.

Dan: Thank you for having me, appreciate it.

Interviewer: No problem. Now if schools reopen, what will that look like, and who ultimately comes up with that plan?

Dan: Well, what will happen is since the governor has given approval for that, the superintendents and local politicians will be working on draft plans to submit to the department of health and the department of education for approval. There won’t be one specific model, each school is gonna kind of look at their students and see what works best for them.

Interviewer: So what happens if students or even staff in those particular schools test positive?

Dan: Well, their plan should lay that out. Certain school districts, depending on their size have gone to, you know, remote learning or, you know, part coming in a couple days of the week and then one school district is actually doing remote learning part of the day and coming in part of the day. So they should have a plan where, you know, if one person or a member of the staff, you know, does get COVID what’ll happen is they might send them home for two weeks, the whole entire school or just that classroom, it really will depend on that model that they’ve chosen.

Interviewer: What are some of the concerns about not opening schools until it’s safe or until there’s a vaccine?

Dan: Right. That has been a major concern. Remote learning, first of all, the teachers have been phenomenal in adapting to what’s going on here, they’ve been great. What’s happening is the remote learning though they are finding are some experts that are saying, you know, maybe because kids don’t have the internet or the computers or anything like that, that they would suspect there could be a higher dropout rate which would be very unfortunate for its students.

Interviewer: For more information on what are your rights, just go to our website, we have a section dedicated to all of what are your rights segments there. Just go to cbs6albany.com.