UPDATE: New York City Mayor de Blasio announced he will be reopening the city’s elementary schools in a complete reversal from an earlier decision to close all schools in the country’s largest school district.

Leave it up to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to make a situation go from bad to worse, particularly for parents in the city. Earlier this week, he told millions of parents that he will “keep re-opening schools” even though he shut down the largest district days before to mitigate a resurgence of COVID-19.

A reporter called out asking, “this morning you said that when we get into December, we’re going to start re-opening schools. Can you clarify what that means?”

“I spoke to this yesterday, we’re going to be in an orange zone until December, the orange zone rules for opening schools are very clear, they’re very stringent but we can meet that standard but it’s going to take a lot of work and like I said parents got to be really involved but we can do it,” de Blasio said.

“We’re going to start with the special education district 75 schools, work our way up pre-K, three K and elementary,” he added about reopening schools. “It’s going to take a lot of work that we never had to do on this level before so we’re shifting a lot of testing resources over but we will keep reopening schools and we want to fight back this second wave, and as we fight it back successfully we’ll be able to speed up that process.”

All that talk left out the most important fact that days earlier he had closed down five boroughs, sending millions of children to attend schools at home and putting New York City parents in another predicament: how do you balance work and teach kids at home.

de Blasio took a moment to remember former NYC Mayor David Dinkins, who recently passed, saying he always spoke of “the power of love” for children, especially those of color.

You can follow Sara A. Carter on Parler @SaraCarterOfficial or on Twitter @SaraCarterDC