Ms. Mächtle, face-to-face classes started again on Monday in Rhineland-Palatinate, as in several federal states. At the same time, the omicron variant of the coronavirus is spreading. What is the situation like at the Graefenau elementary school?
Amazingly, we didn’t have a single positive case during testing today. But there are some children again, as they have often done in the Corona period. Maybe they are still in their countries of origin. As a school, we now have to follow the quarantine rules. Not all parents know this for their respective country of origin.
Hasn’t the job of school principal become easier in the third year of the pandemic?
Absolutely not. The work is not getting any less. We have now also received the condition to support the health department: We should follow up on contacts and inform the parents about the quarantine rules. In addition, we also had to be partially accessible during the holidays. And the corona tests are an enormous administrative burden.
After the autumn break, the number of infections in schools rose massively. That could really happen with Omikron after Christmas.
Yes, there is concern. After the autumn break, the infections came with a bit of a delay. But then there were new cases every day. With us in Rhineland-Palatinate, the holidays were now quite short, so that many families may not have left at all. Still, of course, people met. We’ll have to wait and see what happens when the Omi-kron variant is added.
Are the children currently infected?
Yes. Although today I was very surprised that all of the children were negative when tested. Obviously, however, we cannot be entirely sure that the rapid tests will jump to the new variant. In addition, there are now a number of recovered children at the school. The recreational area is usually more critical than school for an infection. For many parents, the precautionary measures are close to zero. Some say there is no Corona. Others are over-cautious.
In many places there is now a demand to return to distance teaching soon, also to protect the students. Would that be better?
No, by no means for us, because the children completely lose their day-to-day structure and social structure. During the pandemic, they accumulated enormous deficits not only in the area of learning, but also in social interaction. Around 98 percent of the children at my school have a migration background, many of them don’t speak German at first and have enormous needs. Therefore, we offered a wide range of emergency care during the distance learning. Not so much because the parents had to work – many here don’t – but for social reasons. During the alternation classes, we took all the children to school for at least two to three hours a day. But there was no daily gambling. Many have forgotten how to work together, argue and resolve conflicts. And many parents are unable to help with homework.
You made house calls during the lockdowns. What did you see
I made a lot of house calls, and at twelve o’clock I met children in their pajamas. They had just got up. To recapture these children, to give them structure, that will be damn difficult. Then there are the learning deficits. They are most noticeable in the first two levels of our school. The number of students who had to repeat first grade at my school roughly doubled in the past school year. Another distance lesson would be a disaster for the children.
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