All of New Jersey’s schools — public and private, and including colleges — will close their doors to students Wednesday as the coronavirus continues to spread in the state, Gov. Phil Murphy announced Monday.
“All schools in New Jersey, public, private, parochial, from pre-K through grade 12, and colleges and universities, will close effective Wednesday March 18th,” Murphy said via tweet.
The governor said they will stay closed “until such time as deemed by health officials to be safe for classes to resume.”
Murphy said during a news conference in Trenton on Monday afternoon that the closure will be for at least two weeks, but “we will not tie ourselves to an arbitrary date.”
“We will not put students, educators, and staff and their families at risk,” he said. “We will do this the right way, the responsible way.”
The order does not include daycare centers, Murphy said.
“For the moment, we think the burden on particularly fist responders and health care workers, when you add to that shuttering of every school in the state, we need to be smart about this,” the governor said.
Murphy has been saying as recently as Sunday that state officials will “inevitably” shut down all of the state’s public schools. It was just a matter of timing.
He said one of the reasons for the delay was “the only hot meal, the only good meal (some students) get a day, are from a school,” so officials wanted to make sure a plan was in place first to get those students meals.
The shutdown will affect about 1.4 million public school students and more than 115,000 teachers, while closing more than 2,500 schools across the state.
Districts have been scrambling to develop plans for virtual learning, but many schools will resort to sending home worksheets. More than 250,000 of New Jersey’s nearly 2 million public school students don’t have access to a computer or tablet at home, according to the state.
Some superintendents said their schools will be limited in how much new instruction they can provide. Concerns about services for special educations services have already emerged.
As of Saturday, 400 of the state’s 600 public school districts had notified the state of planned closures, officials said.
On Monday, Murphy, along with governors in New York and Connecticut, made an unprecedented move in all three states to close all movie theaters, gyms and casinos indefinitely beginning 8 p.m. Monday. Meanwhile, restaurants and bars will be allowed to accept dine-in customers only until 8 p.m. Monday and will be allowed to offer only takeout and delivery after that for the foreseeable future.
The three governors also asked for statewide curfews, urging people not to leave their homes unless it’s an emergency or essential travel.
NJ Advance Media staff writer Adam Clark and Brent Johnson contributed to this report.
Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewArco or Facebook.
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