BERLIN (AP) – Under pressure to ease virus restrictions in Germany, officials agreed last month to gradually reopen schools. Confirmed COVID-19 cases started to rise again, pushing some states back, while others pushed and insisted that classroom teaching should be the rule.
Caught in the middle are students, parents and teachers like Michael Gromotka, whose plans to give art to his 7-9 year old students were turned upside down last week when the state of Berlin halted their return to school after months of distance learning.
“It was all very chaotic,” said Gromotka. “We have less than a week’s notice.”
Gromotka, who is married to a fellow teacher and has a child in elementary school, says the commuting reflects the lack of a coherent strategy to keep schools safely open in Germany.
The authorities in Berlin have bought about 1,900 air filters that experts say will reduce the risk of spreading the virus through classrooms. But the number available is only enough to supply each of the 900 schools in the capital with about two devices.
Berlin’s online learning platform is so congested during the day that some elementary school students have to wait until 6:30 PM to get their video lessons. More reliable commercial systems were discarded due to privacy concerns.
And while Berlin now offers free tests for staff and students, no one has to take them before they go to school.
“Teachers are incredibly concerned,” Gromotka told The Associated Press.
He launched a petition demanding that secondary school teachers be prioritized when it comes to getting coronavirus vaccines, arguing that they deserve the same protection as elementary and kindergarten teachers due to the high number of students they interact with each week. come.
Like other educators, Gromotka says officials have failed to learn the right lessons about the pandemic for over a year.
Figures from Germany’s disease control agency, the Robert Koch Institute, show that the number of weekly confirmed cases among under-15s has more than doubled in the past month as more children returned to schools and kindergartens.
The proposal to give all teachers priority in vaccinations, as Italy does, has received support from some education unions.
“We cannot pretend that schools are isolated from the rest of society,” said Juergen Boehm, president of VDR, an association that represents certain secondary school teachers across Germany.
The former principal says it is nearly impossible to enforce the wearing of masks and social distance rules in school corridors and buses, and that if all 1 million teachers in the country were given the opportunity to protect them from COVID-19, it would be mean “much less trouble”.
Likewise, Boehm supports a system of regular mandatory testing – with help from the Red Cross or the military if necessary – and a firm barrier to resorting to online education in regions with more than 100 new weekly cases per 100,000 residents.
Many provinces and cities are already exceeding that limit, and Chancellor Angela Merkel and Germany’s 16 governors agreed that they should activate an “emergency brake” for looser restrictions. But several states have insisted that schools should nevertheless remain open, arguing that it is in the best interest of children to attend school.
As Merkel meets again with governors on Monday to discuss the extension of the lockdown measuresSome government officials suggest that the threshold for closing schools and kindergartens should be as high as 200 newly confirmed cases per week per 100,000 residents.
So far, the government has said there is little it can do under the German federal system to enforce national rules for schools. As in the United States, education policy is largely the responsibility of the 16 states of Germany.
Boehm says he supports the principle of local school surveillance, but believes there should be a clear rule for everyone in a situation like the pandemic.
Lothar Wieler, the head of the Robert Koch Institute, said earlier this month that from an infection control standpoint, “closing (schools) would of course be a good step.”
But he recognized that factors other than medical concerns also needed to be considered, and said that classroom teaching could continue if “intelligent plans” were put in place to ensure it was safe.
The institute has proposed how that could be done with rigorous testing, mask wearing and hygiene policies that would significantly reduce the risk of infection.
“It just has to be implemented,” said Wieler.
Amid growing fears among tired parents that schools will soon be closing again, the federal government has recently stepped up funding for school test kits but has refrained from enforcing rules on their use.
“It is the responsibility of the states to organize this,” said Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert.
German minister for families, Franziska Giffey, said on Monday that preschoolers should also be tested regularly, given the rising cases there. She suggested that parents should be responsible for testing their own children.
Gromotka said that teachers want schools to be safe and reliable, but that is being achieved, but that having a clear testing strategy and vaccinating all teachers is a good way to start.
“Otherwise, I fear schools will have to close again soon, and that would be terrible for everyone involved,” he said.
Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak