After a stressful start to the school year for teachers, with building safety issues and scheduling changes, South Bronx teacher Jo Macellaro said she felt some relief when welcoming her students back this week amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“Just seeing the kids, I felt a lot better,” she said. “Just like, this is why I do this.”

Students with disabilities enrolled in District 75, the city’s network of special education schools, along with public preschool and pre-kindergarten students, were among the first children back in school buildings this week. New York City students in kindergarten through high school will return for in-person learning next week, after the city imposed another last-minute delay to the start of the school year.

Macellaro teaches a mixed classroom of children in kindergarten through second grade classified with “emotional disturbance” at P186X, a District 75 school in Morrisania. She has had some of them for multiple years; she said they were elated to see her and their own classmates after six months away from school.

“Some of them know each other and they want to go and hug each other and they want to play together,” she said. “And I'm so happy that they have that kind of relationship because these kids tend to fight a lot.”

But she has to enforce a new way of life in the classroom: wearing masks, staying several feet apart, and definitely no hugs.

“I feel like it's the opposite of everything that I've taught them,” Macellaro said.

She is going over new school year routines with some adjustments. The kids do not practice lining up, because they don’t need to line up to travel to different parts of the building this year. She is having to think through new “classroom jobs,” since she can’t assign children tasks like holding the door open for others or passing out pencils to classmates.

But some changes have more significant consequences. Macellaro says school life during a pandemic is hampering her ability to foster the connections that her students greatly need. She acknowledged that special-education students in particular should be back in school to receive the in-person support required for them to learn. But, at the same time, many of the new rules related to COVID-19 precautions are not developmentally appropriate for her kids.

“A lot of what I usually do with them is, from the beginning, building classroom community and working on social emotional skills,” said Macellaro. “And now they can't even share blocks together. They can't work in small groups together like I would normally have them do. We can't play a game where we pass a ball to each other and have to ask each other questions or any of those sorts of things that I would normally do with them.”

Some students also need frequent, one-on-one contact with educators. Some children may need physical help from one or more adults in order to remain seated—or stay in the classroom. Other children with cognitive delays may need help in the bathroom or are not toilet trained and need diapering.

Teachers and paraprofessionals told Gothamist/WNYC that the city has failed to put out meaningful guidance on how to safely work with this unique population of students, which numbers approximately 25,000 citywide. According to the latest DOE numbers, about 14,000 are currently opting for in-person instruction, with 11,000 signed up for full remote learning.

What’s more, teachers said District 75 students needed trauma-informed instruction, after living through the peak of the city’s COVID-19 outbreak in the spring, followed by a summer of protests against police brutality and systemic racism. Approximately 87 percent of students in District 75 schools are non-white, according to last year’s enrollment numbers. And nearly 87 percent of students are below the poverty line.

“We have students who have lost family members, students who have been through God knows what the past few months,” said Macellaro.

She said students’ lives have been upended and they need help from school staff to process the changes and loss. But she worried that teachers and support staff wouldn’t be able to do that because teachers “themselves are scared and stressed.”

COVID-19 hit close to home for Macellaro. She lost a colleague to the illness last spring, and since returning to school in September, her school building has already had one positive case.

Another Brooklyn teacher, who asked to remain anonymous because she does not yet have tenure, said she craved instructions from a health professional on when and how to effectively use the different personal protective equipment provided to District 75 staff.

“We have the PPE. It’s there,” said the Brooklyn teacher. “But nobody ever gets trained on these things. Training to me isn’t, ‘Here’s a gown.’ It should be a doctor or hospital workers saying, ‘These are the areas of your body that you need to protect.’”

She said she feels the city’s Department of Education has not been supportive of District 75 teachers or other school staff, and by extension the students they serve.

“They say they care, but they have no interest in listening to what the actual day-to-day issues are that we need to address,” she said.

It’s a sentiment echoed by other teachers who penned a letter to the mayor and schools chancellor, by advocates for children with disabilities, and members of the parent-led Community Education Council for District 75.

In the meantime, teachers and school administrators are doing what they can to make things work for students.

The Brooklyn teacher, who works with students on the autism spectrum, said she was trying to quickly recalibrate how to establish structure in her classroom during a pandemic year, just as Macellaro had.

“Everything is custom tailored to the student,” she noted, such as printing out pictures of students during different parts of the day in order to illustrate routines to follow.

But there are some additional hurdles to getting those routines going, such as new printing protocols. Since teachers can’t congregate in one area to print or make copies of something, all printing requests have to be made to a school secretary. Likewise, teachers are asked to leave the school building earlier than usual for cleaning.

“Normally, I would stay in my room until 7 p.m. trying to figure things out,” said the Brooklyn teacher. “Now it’s like, I gotta get out of here.”

She acknowledged that the routines would settle down, and feel easier, in the coming weeks. That’s as long as students and teachers stay healthy and keep COVID-19 out of schools.

The thought of the spread of the virus, or even just enough positive cases to shut down a school building temporarily, looms large in the back of Macellaro’s mind.

“I do kind of feel a sense of impending doom,” said Macellaro. “Like, at any second someone's going to say like, ‘Oh, we're going remote again. There's been another positive case.’ And it's just going to be very disruptive for the students and for everyone.”