New York City Mayor Adams said he was very pleased with various city agencies on the handling of Tuesday's nor'easter, which saw just a few inches of snow in the morning hours but quickly tapered off and disappeared as the day went on. That said, Department of Education Chancellor David Banks pointed the finger at IBM for a clumsy remote school day for public school children.
Adams said he visited his old stomping grounds at P.S. 140 in Queens in the morning, witnessing the sanitation department’s snow removal efforts.
“I was just really pleased to see how the Department of Sanitation and the crews were out there plowing and salting the streets and I really want to thank New Yorkers for taking this seriously,” said Adams during his weekly media briefing that was online Tuesday.
He was thankful to see a sparse amount of people driving and walking the streets during the morning snowfall.
“DSNY made sure that the sites were clear so that people get to the polls and exercise their constitutional and democratic right to vote and rest assured we will continue to serve the city,” said Adams, referring to Tuesday's special elections where the seats of defamed Representative George Santos and suddenly-resigned Assemblymember Latoya Joyner (Bronx) were decided.
Continuing on his praise for the sanitation department, the mayor stayed consistent with his sentiment of keeping the streets clean and free from his number one foe: rats.
“Immediately after handling the snow we're going to deal with any trash removal,” said Adams. “We're going out of the days where we allow trash to sit on our streets for days.”
While operations for DSNY and the Board of Elections were reportedly swift despite the snow, the same couldn’t be said for schools under the Department of Education. All public schools shifted to remote learning for Tuesday, which meant almost 900,00 students had to log onto the city’s remote learning portal. But when it came time for students to log on, many students faced difficulty, leading to DOE absorbing many of the complaints.
Chancellor Banks pointed the finger at IBM, the technology company responsible for the portal’s user authentication system.
“IBM was not ready for primetime,” said Banks, mentioning that the company was already aware of the vast number of students that would be logging on for school Tuesday morning. “At around that time, they said we were overwhelmed with the surges, though somehow they were surprised that there were so many folks who were coming on.”
Banks added that the remote day, (the first ever since the end of COVID remote learning), wasn’t snarled for every student in the city. As of 11:30 a.m., Banks reported 850,000 students had logged in.
The mayor chimed in on the remote day dilemma following the chancellor’s remarks, offering some diplomacy.
“Remote learning is going to be with us for a while,” said Adams. “We're going to continue to see the various iterations. And the goal is to get perfection. And there's a journey to get perfection.
