Teachers in France are on a massive strike today, protesting the government’s failure to adopt a policy to manage the covid-19 pandemic in schools and to adequately protect students and staff from infection.
Teachers, parents and school principals are trying to cope with the new test rules, which were announced before the end of the Christmas holidays, but have since been amended twice after the criticism.
“The government is announcing things, but it is not thinking about what this means for the staff, it is hell they are asking us and it is not working properly,” complained this week Olivier Flippo, director of a school in Paris.
After Christmas, under the new rules, students now undergo three diagnostic tests over a four-day period if a positive covid-19 case is detected in their class: an antigen or molecular test on the day the case is reported – the result of which should be to show before entering school– and two more self tests which they do on the second and fourth day.
This process is complicated by the increase in covid-19 cases in schools, which has closed thousands of the 427,000 classrooms in France.
The government of President Emanuel Macron responds that complicated rules are the price of keeping schools open, explaining that it has therefore changed its previous policy of closing a department once a case has been identified.
But under the new policy, many schools are under pressure to continue their studies, despite the fact that the number of covid-19 cases among students and teachers is increasing and each case means that dozens of students need to rush to pharmacies and laboratories to undergo a diagnostic test.
According to forecasts by Snuipp-FSU, the largest primary education teachers’ union, 75% of teachers are likely to go on strike today.
“It’s the most historic mobilization of the last twenty years in terms of its scale,” he said. – Michel Blanche who denounced “a strike against the virus”.
The strike has been declared by almost all teachers’ unions and is supported by parents’ organizations and the school principals’ union.
“The exhaustion and indignation of the entire educational community has reached unprecedented levels,” eleven teachers’ unions said in a statement.
“The responsibility of the minister and the government for this chaotic situation is complete due to the constant changes in the rules, the protocols that do not work and the lack of the necessary tools to ensure that the schools can function properly,” they added.
Source: ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ
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Source From: Capital
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