katherine creag is live outside city hall with the story that broke overnight and this is terrible newsor tens of thousands of new york city families >> reporter: it really is. because we've heard from parents and most tell us that they are frustrated, they firmly believe that the school buildings are the safest place for their children and even though the covid positivity rate, the 7 day average, is at 3%, within the city school buildings, the covid positivity rate is less than 1 pr and why we're here at city hall, this is where a large rally will take place a little later this morning with hundreds of parents and their children gathering here and they will hand over a petition or at least get it to the married's office, it has 11,000 signatures on it with families saying that they want school buildings to remain open, they believe that that dynamic of having in-classroom learning one-on-one teacher and student learning is so important to them but this is the tragedy as you said that all of these children, about 500,000 of them who were going into their school buildings, it ends today