F.A.Z. Newsletter Coronavirus
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How the schools organize these tests in practice is up to them. Testing in classrooms shouldn’t really be an option – the air would quickly become enriched with aerosols once everyone has taken off their masks. “While it was still said in February that testing in the classroom was too unsafe because you sneeze when you swab it …, the Senate Education Administration has now come to a different conclusion,” criticized the Berlin State Parents’ Committee. As in Brandenburg, only the primary school students (first to sixth grade) and the final classes should return to face-to-face classes after the Easter break. Grades seven through nine will follow on April 19, when the high school graduates have left school.
The main reason for anger among secondary school teachers is that their vaccination appointments (with Astra-Zeneca) have been canceled. The only state that has vaccinated all secondary school teachers with the exception of one district is Saxony-Anhalt. In most other countries, vaccinations could only be offered to primary school teachers.
Because North Rhine-Westphalia did not manage to get enough tests, all students there except for the final classes have to stay in distance lessons. There has been talk of a test strategy for schools since Christmas, and the rapid tests are available. The federal and state governments agreed on at least two tests per week for students and school staff in February. As a rule, North Rhine-Westphalia wants to stay in learning groups with half the class size for alternating lessons.
Baden-Württemberg requires a negative corona test
In Baden-Württemberg, teachers, students and caretakers are no longer allowed to take part in lessons or enter the school premises after April 19 without a negative Corona test, according to the will of the Ministry of Culture. Those who do not test themselves have to be trained digitally. The state government prescribes this for urban and rural districts with more than 100 new corona infections per 100,000 inhabitants on three consecutive days and also describes it as an “indirect test obligation”. The guided self-tests are the responsibility of the school. Anyone who returns to school in the week of April 12th can still be tested voluntarily.
In Bavaria, schools are to offer distance learning again with an incidence of 100 in a city or district, in Saxony they are to remain open regardless of the incidence. Hamburg only switches to distance learning when the incidence is over 200 over several days.
Lessons are taking place again in Saxony-Anhalt and Rhineland-Palatinate, and school in Saarland also started again on Thursday. Hamburg did not have an Easter break, and the holidays in Hesse and Schleswig-Holstein will last until the end of next week.
While the paediatricians point to the permanent damage to children who have not had school for so long (in the middle school of grades seven to nine it is now four months), the teachers’ associations want schools to continue to be closed. The Kiel education researcher Olaf Köller pointed out to the FAZ that the Leopoldina National Academy had already called for test strategies for schools in August of last year, but nothing had happened. He advocated switching lessons – as far as technically possible – adding the group learning at home and teaching hybrid.
He also spoke out once again in favor of restricting himself to the core subjects, especially in middle school, and promoting the students here because they take their final exams in these subjects. Köller accused the education ministers of still having no strategy and no real concepts for alternate teaching.
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