NEW YORK (AP) — Public school sites in the 1.1 million-student New York City district will be shuttered for the rest of the academic year to curb the spread of the coronavirus, Mayor Bill De Blasio said Saturday — but was quickly challenged by the governor, who said the decision on school closings was his to make.

“It is my legal authority in this situation, yes,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at his daily briefing on the outbreak.

Public schools in New York City, the U.S. epicenter of the virus outbreak, have been closed since March 16. A massive effort to move instruction online has met with mixed success in the city, where many low-income students lack Wi-Fi and devices for connecting to their virtual classrooms.

De Blasio resisted closing schools even as the city recorded its first deaths from the coronavirus, saying he feared that health care workers would have to stay home to care for children and that hundreds of thousands of poor students would go hungry without their free school meals.

Authorities in some other locales, including the states of Virginia and Pennsylvania, have previously announced that schools will be shuttered for the rest of the year.

New Jersey has not yet made such an announcement.

This post has been updated to reflect Gov. Cuomo’s statement challenging Mayor De Blasio’s closure order.