The return to class will be face-to-face: Education will demand more “tension” from the communities in the application of the anticovid protocol | Education

Classes from kindergarten to university will resume next Monday, January 10, without delays, or groups at home, or exams virtual. There are no planned changes, but the Government is going to ask the regional executives in the Interterritorial Health Council this Tuesday that the educational centers take extreme measures against the anticovid that were being relaxed as the pandemic remitted, today runaway by the omicron variant. In many centers, although the protocols approved in June 2020 have not been decaffeinated, the strict rules that allowed the classrooms not to be closed the previous year – when there were more group splits – have been applied more loosely: students have been allowed to Children take off their masks in the yard, the classrooms have not been aired with such care and the temperature measurement at the door has worked irregularly.

Great tensions are not expected in the meeting this Tuesday as most of the communities, in many cases through the mouth of their presidents (Castilla y León, Galicia or Castilla-La Mancha), have shown their interest in maintaining presence in the classrooms . The only communities that have doubted the teaching modality, but will not make changes, have been two in the hands of the popular: Madrid, which considered leaving the older students at home (3rd and 4th of ESO and Baccalaureate), and Murcia. “The Community of Madrid is aware of the importance for families that students return physically to the centers, since in addition to the pedagogical benefits of face-to-face classes, schools are an essential element in reconciling life work and family ”, the Minister of Health, Enrique Ruiz Escudero, explained about his final decision. The other option would have been controversial after keeping the nightclubs open and the massive concerts. In this region, children will have to wear the mask in the yard again, to comply with the new rule for outdoor use.

Among the measures that are being studied is also the possible change in the quarantines of the students, who must now be isolated for 10 days if they are considered as close contact of a positive case and are not vaccinated. A draft of the update that Health is preparing of the covid protocol for educational centers, accessed by the string SER, proposes that kindergarten and elementary school students do not have to quarantine in any case. “They will be exempt from quarantine, regardless of their vaccination status, all close contacts of early childhood education and all close contacts of both the stable coexistence groups, GCE [grupos burbuja], as well as unorganized groups such as GCE of primary education ”, says the text.

The Ministry of Health warns that the text is not yet final, reports Pablo Linde, so it remains to be seen if that proposal will succeed. In any case, on that same path, Andalusia has announced this Monday that it will no longer require the quarantine of entire classrooms when it registers positive cases of students in bubble classrooms, reports Javier Martín-Arroyo. “In the event of any outbreak or positive case, the students will be isolated in coordination with the health center nurse”, advanced the Andalusian Minister of Health, Jesús Aguirre. Last Friday Madrid also announced that it would not isolate the entire class. While in Navarra, from the beginning of the year, when there is a positive case, all schoolchildren are screened with PCR and, if all the tests are negative, they continue in class.

In the last week of the course, 1.3% of the classrooms in Spain were confined, the highest percentage of the entire quarter, coinciding with the exponential growth of the cases of the omicron variant. The Government expects that this figure will be exceeded after the first week of class, but considers that it will be a very short rebound, without continuity in time, as it trusts that by the end of January more than 90% of students between 5 and 11 years – schoolchildren in the last year of kindergarten and all those in primary school – have at least the first dose of the vaccine. In Spain there are 3.3 million children of that age group and 1.3 million immunizations have already been distributed. This week, two million are expected to arrive. According to data from the Ministry of Health, on December 29, 26.8% of these minors were inoculated, with large regional differences: from 20.7% in La Rioja to 37.5% in Asturias.

Of the 5,433 classrooms that were confined last week of last trimester only a hundred belonged to secondary school o Vocational Training, since young people between 12 and 18 years of age have been vaccinated for the most part (89.9% on December 29). The Government recognizes that the group of young people between 18 and 29 years old, coinciding with the university stage, is particularly concerned and the issue will be dealt with in the interterritorial. They are the ones that alternate the most in places with strong transmission of the covid – such as bars, concerts, illegal bottles or nightclubs – and the seconds most reluctant to get vaccinated. 84.3% of young people between 20 and 29 years of age are inoculated, three points more than in the 30 to 39 age group, but well below those over 60 years of age, who are close to 100%.

Many groups have been in favor of being present, such as CEAPA, the coordinator that brings together the parents of the public school. “It is the only way to guarantee equity and equal opportunities for all students,” says Leticia Cardenal, president of CEAPA, which includes 12,000 associations. But it also demands that there be more reinforcement of teachers to carry out class divisions, as happened last year, lower ratios or more distancing measures.

The majority union among teachers, the Workers’ Commissions, has joined this call from parents in a statement: “The ratios must be reduced to a maximum of 20 students per classroom to guarantee interpersonal distance of at least 1.5 meters. For this, it is necessary to recover and increase the extra staff from the past year and ensure all the substitutions of the teaching staff ”.

The exams will continue to be face-to-face

Spanish universities advocate maintaining the January exams in person, despite the increase in the number of cases. This was expressed by the Rectors’ Conference (CRUE) in a statement: “We defend a return to the classroom within the maximum possible normality as the best option to guarantee the right to Education and its quality in the universities that are of face-to-face character ”. The CRUE considers that the return will be possible “thanks to the experience accumulated by the universities in the application of hygienic-sanitary measures in these almost two years of pandemic.”

In January 2021, these face-to-face examinations were the first major public disagreement between the then minister, Manuel Castells, and the rectors. The CRUE regretted at that time the “populism” of Castells, which was aligned with the complaints of the students when questioning the sanitary safety of the tests: “There is no reason why examinations have to be face-to-face when sanitary conditions do not allow it,” he said. This Tuesday, the new minister, Joan Subirats, will speak for the first time about the situation in the universities in a meeting with the press.

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