Secretary General of the Teachers’ Union-Unsa, Stéphane Crochet, fears the disorganization that could imply the multiplication of absences among teachers contaminated or exposed to the virus.
No vacation allowance for students. A postponement of the start of the school year after an end of year vacation and their share of family reunions is not on the government’s program to try to stem the epidemic outbreak caused by the omicron variant. The Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, has rehashed in recent days his opposition to this measure. “This is what we do last because we put children first in all our decisions”, he proclaimed on December 19. Three days later, however, his colleague from Health, Olivier Véran, estimated that “It is among children that the virus circulates the most”, especially “Because the children are stirred at school, they crossed paths, they played, because respecting barrier gestures is more difficult, because they are not vaccinated and they could not not so far ”.
In an open letter addressed to the Minister of Health published this Sunday in the JDD, fifty health workers say they are “Very worried” facing “Current level of viral circulation of the coronavirus among children and adolescents of school age”, and ask “Postponement of the start of the school year”. Signatory of the tribune and columnist for Libé, Christian Lehmann estimated in our columns: “Nothing is secure, you have to close another week.” But for Stéphane Crochet, general secretary of the Teachers’ Union-Unsa, it is above all necessary to improve the fight against the epidemic at school, and especially the quality of the air in classrooms and places of catering.
A priori, the health defense council of Monday evening should not decide to postpone the start of the school year. What do you think ?
We are not epidemiologists. We do not have the means to assess the right measures to be taken. What we can say, on the other hand, is that whenever decisions were made for the school, whether it was the closure or the half-gauge system, it was always at the same time as measures in the general population, with confinement or a curfew. The postponement of the start of the school year, in reality, we do not see what meaning this would bring from an epidemic point of view. The main concern is the school’s ability to hold out until the February holidays. That the schooling, during this month and a half, resembles a normal schooling, between the tests of the children and the absences on the side of the teachers.
For Jean-Michel Blanquer, a postponement of the start of the school year, “It is the opposite of common sense”.
The minister has his reading grid. He made the non-closure of classes a personal matter. We want education to be maintained, but not under any conditions. The latest move at the end of November to keep a class open even with a positive case caused terrible tension. We must return to a closure from the first case, as before. There, we start again with the feeling that the epidemic is still progressing. Before the holidays, classes were closing one after another, one student after another was positive, and families were panicking.
The Scientific Council estimates that in January, a third of teachers will be directly or indirectly affected. And the same for the students …
This is the great fear, with the disorganization that would engender. We asked the Ministry of National Education for its plan to remedy this, it replied that it was going to recruit contract teachers to replace teachers who could not ensure the class. It is not known whether these recruitments were completed. It will not be at the level of a third of the teachers, but we can still hope that all the teachers affected by the Covid are not at the same time!
Do you think that beyond the postponement of the start of the school year, the school health plan is effective today?
Several points are problematic. Air quality in classrooms already! Our perception is that the minister thinks we are on to something secondary. For almost two years, we have been repeating it, and there is no progress. We need CO2 sensors, air purifiers… Sensors are not expensive! They already have an educational virtue: we do not feel how quickly the air is saturated. One or two per school would make it possible to realize this, to understand the need to ventilate, to know when to do it. There is also a big problem when it comes to catering for the pupils. Of course, they eat at the same table, with the same classmates, but the spaces are too small, not sufficiently ventilated, with a lot of students. In quite a few small towns, catering could be done in the village hall – we cannot say that we are making great use of it at the moment … It is a simple solution, and yet we repeat it over and over.
In their forum, the fifty health workers decry “The weak resources deployed” by National Education to curb the epidemic in schools, and in particular “To organize effective test campaigns”.
The campaigns carried out are useful but they must have been difficult to deploy. They are often out of time. There is a need for reactive testing campaigns, immediately where cases are found. Today, they are iterative, that is to say they return to where there have been cases to detect outbreaks of epidemics. We are also faced with a difficulty: the support of families to have their child tested during these campaigns. We have seen that when cases are detected and the campaign is reactive, the family membership rate is much higher.