Covid-19: call for a strike in schools on January 13 in the face of “an indescribable mess”

“An indescribable mess”. This is how the return to school is qualified, disrupted by the Omicron variant and framed by a new protocol, which requires a multiplication of tests. The SNUipp-FSU, the first union of primary teachers, and the SE-Unsa for schools but also colleges and high schools, launched, Friday January 7, a call for a national strike for Thursday January 13. An inter-union meeting of education unions is scheduled for 5 p.m.

“The situation since the start of the January school year has generated (…) a strong feeling of abandonment and anger among school staff”, deplores the SNUipp-FSU in a press release. The union particularly regrets the fact that “during the health meeting yesterday (Thursday), The Minister (Jean-Michel Blanquer, editor’s note) once again remained deaf to the demands made by the trade unions to secure the school “. He “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 for a secure school under Omicron.”

Concretely, teachers have until Monday evening to declare themselves strikers. In addition to the SNUipp-FSU, the SE-Unsa also calls on teachers and other stakeholders “to go on strike in schools, colleges and high schools (…) to make the minister understand that the school and its staff can no longer hold up with impractical protocols that change from day to day”.

Since the start of the January school year, students are now subjected to three tests in four days, if there is a positive in the class: an antigen or PCR on the day of the announcement of the Covid case, with a certificate to be given to the school, then self-tests to be done at home on D + 2 and D + 4. A complicated device, while the cases are multiplying, with already 9,202 classes closed Thursday, January 6, the highest since last spring. Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, who campaigns for “a school open to the maximum”, recognized on Friday CNews that this new protocol was “extremely difficult” to live for families.

“It is a question of reviewing the protocol with in particular the return to the protective rule ‘a positive case = closure of the class’, the isolation of cases of intrafamilial contact and a policy of systematic weekly preventive saliva tests”, asks the SNUipp-FSU. The staff “must now be equipped with surgical masks, and FFP2 for those who wish, self-tests must be provided to them and classrooms and catering rooms equipped with CO2 sensors”.

According to SNUipp, “the political choice of the government is to ensure the reception of the pupils, to allow the parents to go to work, at the expense of the health of the personnel, that of the children, of their families. In the field, the reality is quite different, directors and teachers can no longer properly exercise their teaching missions “. He claims, moreover, that “the ministry is finally widening the pool of replacement staff to compensate for absences by adding and recruiting additional lists as well as by recruiting staff via a budgetary collective”.