Nearly seven out of every ten Staten Island public school students stayed home Tuesday, the day after one of the biggest blizzards in New York City history buried the borough under almost 30 inches of snow. Mayor Zohran Mamdani decided schools would reopen for in-person learning, and Staten Island families decided otherwise.
Department of Education data confirmed a 69.8% absentee rate across Staten Island public schools on Tuesday. Multiple schools reported 80 to 85% of students skipping classes entirely.
For context, the citywide average sat at 36.8%, and on any normal school day, about 11% of the city's nearly 900,000 public school students are absent. Staten Island wasn't just a little worse off than the rest of the city. It was in a different category altogether.
The numbers across the other boroughs tell the story of how unevenly this decision landed. Manhattan's absentee rate was 29.8%. Queens came in at 34.2%. Brooklyn hit 35.1%, and the Bronx reached 36.4%. Staten Island nearly doubled every one of them.
Staten Island is car-dependent. No subway lines are running through its neighborhoods the way they crisscross Manhattan and Brooklyn. When 30 inches of snow buries residential streets, and the city hasn't cleared them, families don't have the option of walking to a subway station and riding underground to school. Borough President Vito Fossella put it plainly:
"We don't have the luxury of jumping on the subway."
Fossella said the city "dropped the ball at the highest levels," a characterization that's hard to argue with when the result is a borough where schools technically opened but functionally didn't. At one school, Myra S Barnes School Intermediate School 24 in Great Kills, the power went out for two hours during the school day. Students who actually made it in got to sit in a building with no electricity.
It wasn't just students. The NY Post reports that Mamdani himself acknowledged this week that roughly 12,000 of the city's 78,300 teachers, about 15%, called out. The city scrambled to recruit 5,000 substitutes to fill the gaps. So even the students who braved icy, unplowed roads arrived at schools that were understaffed and, in at least one case, without power.
The DOE, for its part, declined requests to provide Tuesday's attendance figures for teachers or to break down student attendance by school districts. When the numbers are this bad, the instinct to stop counting is predictable.
Councilman Frank Morano, a Republican representing Staten Island, did not hold back. On the decision to force in-person learning across the entire city regardless of local conditions:
"This is going to go down, along with new Coke and the decision to put hydrogen in the Hindenburg instead of helium, as one of the worst decisions in history."
Colorful, sure. But the underlying point is serious. Morano questioned why the mayor and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuelson couldn't recognize that a borough buried under nearly 30 inches of snow, with no mass transit backbone, might need a different approach than neighborhoods where you can walk to the subway.
"There's no reason Staten Island should have to live by the same rules as Manhattan and The Bronx."
This is the core tension, and it extends well beyond snow days. New York City governs five boroughs with wildly different infrastructure, demographics, and needs through a single centralized bureaucracy. A policy that makes sense for a dense, transit-rich borough can be absurd for a car-dependent one. But the system doesn't flex. It just applies the same rule everywhere and calls it equity.
Morano is now drafting legislation that would give individual boroughs more autonomy over day-to-day decisions like this one. He plans to ask a City Charter Revision Commission appointed by former Mayor Eric Adams to examine the proposal later this year.
"If Staten Islanders saw their elected or appointed leaders actually have some control over day-to-day policies, I think there would be fewer people screaming for secession."
That line lands because it reflects a real and recurring frustration. Staten Island has long been the borough that City Hall treats as an afterthought. Its residents pay city taxes, follow city rules, and absorb city mandates, then watch as decisions get made by officials who clearly had Manhattan in mind when they made them.
The remote learning infrastructure exists. The city spent billions building it out during COVID. Every school in the system has the capability. This wasn't a question of resources or technology. It was a question of whether the mayor would use a tool already in the toolbox. He chose not to, and 70% of Staten Island's students paid for that choice by missing a day of school.
There's a pattern here that conservatives have identified for decades. Centralized authority sounds efficient in theory. In practice, it produces exactly this: a mayor in City Hall deciding that conditions are fine for school because they're fine where he's looking out the window. Meanwhile, a borough 20 miles away is buried, powerless, and functionally shut down.
Local control isn't a slogan. It's the principle that the people closest to a problem are best positioned to solve it. A borough president or local school board looking at 30 inches of unplowed snow would have called a remote day before the first parent tried to dig out a car. Instead, that call belonged to a centralized administration that couldn't be bothered to differentiate between a borough with a dozen subway lines and one with zero.
Fifteen percent of teachers called out citywide. Nearly 70% of students in Staten Island stayed home. The DOE won't release the school-by-school breakdown. And one school lost power for two hours in the middle of the day.
The schools were open. The question is what exactly they were open for.
