On Monday morning, about half of the children at the school appeared to be at home. “Not even because they were all infected themselves, but because brothers and sisters had to stay at home to be tested, for example. Then I thought: I’ll call the GGD again, because I think it’s better to teach online for a few days.”
The school has been closed for several days now, as has another primary school in the area. An unpleasant decision, says Müskens, “but it was the only choice we could make at the moment”.
‘You take risk home’
The director saw that students became very restless from the many infections among classmates. “They kept wondering whether they were infected themselves. And teachers also had to deal with that unrest and the questions from parents in the classroom.”
An employee of another primary school (her name is known to the editors) only wants to anonymously tell about the infections among students – for fear of reactions from parents. She says that teachers are also becoming infected in large numbers, and that two colleagues at her school have now tested positive. “You face a group every day, you take a risk, and you take that home. But we don’t have a choice.”
The employee’s experience is endorsed by figures from the RIVM, which were broken down at the request of the AOb education union. This shows that 21 percent of primary school staff has had corona in the past eighteen months. This was 13 percent among an average group of Dutch people between the ages of 18 and 69.
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