More and more students and teachers positive for Covid-19, classes closed for lack of replacements, masks resurfacing in classes…
As in the general population, the epidemic does not end in the school environment, the parents are “exhausted” and the children “lost”.
For two weeks, the 12.8 million pupils of the first and second degrees have fallen off the mask in class. However, it remains “strongly recommended”, indoors, from the age of 6, for contact persons at risk during the 7 days after the occurrence of the confirmed case as well as for confirmed cases during the 7 days following their period of isolation. , according to the current protocol.
Only a prefectural decision, in the event of a local cluster, could force the return of the mask to the nose and mouth of the students.
At the end of last week, the Ministry of National Education reported 3,184 classes closed due to Covid in France, against 2,693 a week before. This Friday, the Ministry of National Education reports 3,080 closed classes.
It’s go again
“The number of positive Covid cases has only been increasing for a week among students and teachers, here we go again,” worries Guislaine David, the general secretary of SNUipp-FSU, the first primary union. .
And who says case of Covid in the class says recommended return of the mask. “We then find ourselves with students who wear it again and others who don’t. Some children no longer understand anything,” says Stéphane Crochet, secretary general of SE-Unsa.
School principals, very exposed since the start of the health crisis, are again in a “delicate position” where they must “skillfully” encourage families to put the mask back on in the event of a positive case in a class, raises Olivier Flippo , at the head of an elementary school in Cergy (Val-d’Oise).
Several schools recommend wearing a mask
For Isabelle, mother in Paris of a little girl in CP, “it’s no”. “I received an email from the director inviting us to hide our children again because there is a case in the class. My 6-year-old daughter had the Covid two months ago, that’s enough, I refuse to impose that on her, “insists the 41-year-old mother, “exhausted” by all these protocols for two years.
For a week, several schools in France have thus recommended wearing a mask, in particular in the North or in Brittany, areas in which the epidemic is strong. “We take it off, we put it back on, we don’t know, we’re lost,” says Stella, a teenager in third grade in Brittany. After two years of Covid, parents of students are “cautious. We thought we were reaching the end of the tunnel and in fact we are going backwards, so there is general fatigue, ”says Laurent Zameczkowski, spokesperson for the Peep parents’ federation. “We even had the case of a parent who had become lax by force, knowingly sending his positive child to class,” says a kindergarten teacher, on condition of anonymity. “His 4-year-old daughter came to see me saying ‘you know master, I have the nasty disease, like my brother'”, affirms this teacher who recalls in passing that “children never lie”.
Four out of six teachers declared the Covid at the same time
As with previous waves, the proper functioning of schools is based on the replacement of teachers absent due to Covid. “Even with the use of teachers from the additional lists since January to ensure replacements, it is too fair, so we close the classes”, notes Guislaine David. Pupils can be divided into other classes, but within the limits of the reception capacities. “In our school, four out of six teachers declared the Covid at the same time this week, so we had to close the four classes because it was impossible to distribute the students, who were too many”, says Nathalie, teacher in a nursery school near from Paris. “It’s a double penalty: it’s a plague for parents who have to organize themselves and children have been penalized by a dotted school for months,” she regrets.