New start day in middle and high schools. This Monday, the high school students return to their school, after four weeks at home (two weeks of vacation and two weeks away).
A happy reunion? If the majority of young people seem happy to go back to class and most teachers seem to agree on the need to reopen the schools, but there are still some hiccups.
How many classes were closed last week in Loiret after detection of a Covid case at school?
Teachers’ fears
Olivier Lelarge says it bluntly: “I don’t want to be among my students without having been vaccinated.” The SNES-FSU academic co-secretary sums up his state of mind and that of his colleagues at the dawn of this face-to-face recovery with two words: worry and anger.
Concern because “the level of contamination is still high, because the positivity rate remains high, including in our academy “and that, in the face of this,”less than one in five teachers (at the national level, Editor’s note) is now vaccinated “.
Anger because “not all National Education staff have access to priority slots for vaccination, this is the case for the principal educational advisers (CPE) for example “.
“Me, I am a CPE. And I will find myself, like the others, facing the students of course. I will even have to watch the canteen for two hours, in the middle of a hundred students unmasked!”
Olivier Lelarge (SNES-FSU Academic Co-Secretary)
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Five questions to a college principal in Gien, about the resumption of classes scheduled for Monday, May 3
The trade unionist plague: “The government is still not able to anticipate and give us the necessary means. He crashed everything before the holidays. If the week in distance before the holidays went rather well, the week after, we lost students. Yes, it is important to keep schools open. So let’s make it happen in the best possible conditions, with masks, CO2 sensors, vaccines! “
“Going back to high school without vaccination when there are thousands of free places in the centers … An additional aberration.”
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The “serenity” of the rector
The state of mind is very different on the side of the rector Katia Béguin. “We obviously keep an eye on contamination, but we know thatwe now have the necessary reactivity in the event of a class closure. The situation is much more reassuring than last year, from this point of view. “
“The two markers of the hardening of protocol in this new school year are the half-gauge in high school and the closing of a class as soon as a proven positive case”.
Katia Beguin (The rector of the Orléans-Tours academy)
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“A real logistical challenge”
“Reassuring”, too, knowing that “everyone can now monitor themselves”. The rector refers here to autotests, “which are in addition to the antigenic and salivary tests for which we target the areas where the virus is most active”.
Concretely, “the boxes will arrive from this week in high schools. Two self-tests per week are planned for the staff, and one for the students. Priority will be given to teachers during the distribution. For young people, it will rather be the week following the start of the school year because take the time to initiate them“, adds Katia Béguin. All this represents” a real logistical challenge “agrees the manager who figures the number of teachers in high schools in Loiret at around 3,000.
Note that the self-tests are reserved for young people over 15 years old and require parental authorization.
Questions from parents
“Of course we can not wait for the children to resume. And we especially hope that this is done in the best possible conditions, “said Christophe Pallier, president of the Federation of Parents’ Councils (FCPE) of Loiret, the weekend before the return to class.
This representative of parents of students sees the arrival of self-tests for high school students (from 15 years old) as a breakthrough, but a question arises: “How will the application of this measure be possible given the current lack of medical personnel in the establishments?”
According to him, the situation of “school medicine is even more deplorable than the medical desert” of which we often speak. So, inevitably, the presentation of tutorials to students on the use of these self-tests risks “posing a problem”, considers Christophe Pallier.
Blandine Lamorisse
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