Nine in the morning. First day of school for the 2020-2021 academic year in Madrid, back to the classrooms after a bad bug forced classes to stop in class on March 11. But there is no longer a general ringing, no entrance queues, no bulleting on the return. The students, whose parents have measured the temperature before leaving the house and who walk because the surroundings of the centers have been pedestrianized to avoid crowds, are assigned a staggered order of arrival by class. Adults try to prevent them from hugging, but some escapes.
After going through a disinfecting mat, they enter a school with a mask that has been turned upside down and redesigned by the Community’s occupational risk assessment services and where expansion and adaptation works have been rushed in the summer. With walls lined with prohibition and warning signs, children stroll through the new safety corridors, with the outward and return route marked with adhesive on the floor. Before entering class, hands are washed and disinfected in hygiene-friendly spaces in each hallway. There is hydroalcoholic gel everywhere: at the entrance to the school, in the common areas.
There are far fewer children per classroom, so to accommodate them all they teach in the gym, in the library, in the auditorium, on the playground, on the soccer field and even in the cultural center of the neighborhood or in the nearest municipal sports center, although in Estela, where the ratio-covidThe last ones have the desks as close as before, but separated by a screen. Works have also been completed in a hurry and classrooms and schools have been reopened and were closed during the harsh years of the cuts, which cut one billion to the public school according to CC OO, a wound that is still bleeding.
Rodrigo has had less luck, he has a prefabricated barrack, which had been eradicated from Madrid last year and now, although few, they return painfully because of the pandemic. Splitting classes, installing prefabricated classrooms or using public spaces has been impossible in some centers, so students have to combine face-to-face and online teaching, yes, with free Wi-Fi and school tablet for the most disadvantaged and technological training and digital methodologies for teachers.
Classroom of the Colegio de Infantil, Primaria y ESO San Sebastian, in El Boalo, closed by the covid-19 epidemic. On video, families demand from the government a concrete plan for de-escalation in Education by September. Santi Burgos | Atlas
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Beatriz misses her tutor, who no longer teaches as she belongs to a risk group – 30% of the workforce according to union estimates – and now has one of the thousands of newly hired teachers, a student from the last year Teaching staff doing paid internships, a student-assistant, staff from public centers used as classrooms and even parents. The teachers, who have undergone PCR tests before joining their positions, come with a mask and gloves and, for some activities, even with screens. The cleaning is no longer done with the deserted school but, taking advantage of class changes, a mess enters to disinfect and ventilate.
The dining room is no longer the meeting point in stages, several more shifts have been added, the distance between tables has been extended and there are courses that even eat in class. The long-awaited recess also divides the students by courses and in physical education class soccer games have been exchanged for the individual practice of the sport. To change they have changed even the wastebaskets, now with a lid and pedal to isolate the virus, and the taps in the bathrooms to operate them with the elbow. All doors are open so you don’t have to touch them, and there is soap, paper for drying hands and disposable wipes in the toilets. Paper has been reduced to a minimum, as it is the material in which the virus has the longest life.
In Infantil, security measures are stronger. The ratio is reduced by half, there are contactless classrooms-capsules in the patio or in the dining room, neither swings nor sandboxes can be used, teachers wear gowns and pants with rubber bands on wrists and ankles, shoe covers and glasses or screens. Students are taken a temperature before entering and those with fever are not allowed.
In each center, there is a nurse attentive to possible symptoms, a health and safety coordinator and a counselor and the school day and calendar have been reorganized. The curricula of all the stages have been adapted to students who arrive with many gaps and shortcomings from the previous year, who are examined the first few days to adjust the program even more. Children also exit in stages through a different door than the one through which they enter the center, where the entry or visit of any outsider is no longer allowed.
This is the unprecedented panorama that results from adding the CC OO proposals, the majority union in the sector, UGT, the parents federation (FAPA) Francisco Giner de los Ríos and the opposition, filed last week. And it is the intermediate scenario of the three that are shuffling, because the worst implies that there is a second wave of a pandemic and that, either the course cannot be started, or it is interrupted again shortly after starting. Actually, it is a fictional story, because the regional government, for the moment, has not explained how it plans to resume face-to-face education.
“Currently, the Community of Madrid is working on the organization and measures towards the end of this course. Regarding the next and the organization measures of the educational centers, we still cannot advance anything ”, responds an Education spokesperson with the parents in an ay, wondering if their children will start the course normally or if they will continue telecollegiate, with many companies already resuming face-to-face work.
X-ray of education in Madrid
– There are 1,227,255 students enrolled in non-university education, of which 54% are enrolled in a public center, almost 30% in a concerted school and almost 16% in a private one.
– The stage where the greatest number of students is concentrated is in primary, with 432,889, followed by ESO, with 280,356.
– The capital contributes the highest number, 523,667 students, followed by the south of the region, with 297,493.
– There are 3,650 schools, of which 1,891 are public, 558 private and 1,201 private. The most common are line 2, with around 45% of the total, so the type school has about 450 students, 30 teachers, a custodian and an administrative staff. Unions and parents denounce that they are very old, very crowded and that there are many pending phases of construction in the new centers.
– The teachers amount to 95,102, of which 52,097 work in public and 43,005 in private-concerted. The largest age group in the public is 40 to 49, while in the concerted and private age it is from 30 to 39. The non-teaching staff is around 8,300 people.
– Of the 34,880 classrooms, 60.3% have interactive digital systems.
– The budget for non-university education in 2018 was 3,629 million euros.
[Datos obtenidos del anuario oficial Datos y Cifras de la Educación 2019-2020 y de la Consejería de Educación]
