PARIS (Reuters) – The first primary school teachers’ union in France on Friday called a strike for Thursday, January 13, denouncing an “indescribable mess” in schools subject to a constantly evolving and practically inapplicable health protocol to stem the COVID-19 epidemic.
The French government refused to postpone the start of the school year on January 3, as claimed by some professionals, while the country is in the middle of the “Omicron wave”, with a seven-day moving average of more than 200,000 new cases of contamination .
To keep schools open, the Minister of National Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, unveiled last Sunday a new protocol applying from Monday morning, which stipulated in particular that in the presence of a case of coronavirus in a class , it would no longer close. All contact cases, on the other hand, should be tested three times in five days and isolate themselves only if one of the tests is positive.
This “relaxation” has not prevented the closure of more than 9,000 classes since the start of the school year (out of a total of 527,000), a figure more reached since last spring, according to the figures of the ministry, and caused a headache for children and teachers who need to be tested, due to queues in front of pharmacies and the shortage of self-tests.
Faced with mounting discontent, the ministry again changed its protocol on Thursday, no longer requiring the cycle of three tests until after a first positive case and in the event that another case is detected seven days later. the first, and not for each new case in the intervening period.
“Of course it’s hard, of course it’s complicated,” conceded Jean-Michel Blanquer on Friday morning on the CNEWS channel, while considering that the tests are the price to pay to keep the schools open.
“WE ARE COMPLETELY OVERFLOWED”
“The easy way out is to say: children no longer go to school. This is what has happened in many countries, this is what some politicians are proposing. It is not not what I am proposing, ”added the minister.
Far from convincing the teachers, who consider themselves “despised”, the words of Jean-Michel Blanquer seem to have stirred up the anger of their unions.
In a statement released on Friday, the Snuipp-FSU, the first primary school union, “therefore calls on school staff to go on strike on Thursday, January 13, in the face of chaos but also contempt and lies, to obtain the conditions of a secure school under Omicron “.
Deploring “an indescribable mess and a strong feeling of abandonment and anger among the staff”, the union demands “the return to the protective rule” a positive case = closure of the class “, the isolation of cases of intra-family contact and a systematic weekly preventive saliva tests policy “.
In many schools, officials consider the situation untenable. This is the case at Jean Renoir College in Boulogne-Billancourt, southwest of Paris, where around fifty students out of 620 and one in four teachers have tested positive since the start of the school year.
“It was very, very, very difficult because we saw a multiplication of cases, at a rate to which we were not at all used to,” said the director of the school, Aristide Adeilkalam. “Before, we were able to deal with cases as they arose, today we are completely overwhelmed.”
Faced with this degraded situation, the Snuipp-FSU believes that “principals and teachers can no longer carry out their missions properly” and invites the unions to join its protest movement and the teachers to declare themselves on strike. here at Monday evening. A meeting of the education intersyndicale was scheduled for late Friday afternoon.
(Written by Tangi Salaün, with Yiming Woo in Boulogne, edited by Sophie Louet)