Exit Strategy: The Great Crown Experiment in the Classroom

JInexperienced veterans in Berlin are, so to speak, the vanguard when starting an experiment nationwide. After weeks of confinement, some high school graduates will return to their schools for the first time on Monday. First, the exams are written in Latin in the capital. Brandenburg, Bremen, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein have also scheduled exams for the beginning of the week.

In North Rhine-Westphalia, high school graduates and candidates in class 10 and vocational universities can, if they wish, prepare for their exams in classrooms starting on May 12. In the most populous federal state, there are only 148,000 schoolchildren. Bavaria will only open graduate schools starting April 27, and Baden-Württemberg aims to return the first students on May 4.

Federal states want to achieve a state at different speeds that is barely adequately described as “new normal.” Measures against the spread of the coronavirus with exit restrictions, a contact ban, and a distance requirement have been shutting down public, social, and economic life for weeks. Millions of schoolchildren have to stay home. Until Easter, their teachers gave them online assignments that they could do better, and sometimes worse.

Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and the 16 prime ministers have extended exit restrictions and the contact ban until May 4 and have agreed on several relaxation measures, which also means that federal states may open schools earlier if it’s possible. The federal government, federal states, and the conference of culture ministers are trying to save the second half of the 2019/20 school year, which is likely to go down in history as a Corona school year. At the end of April, the federal and state governments want to give advice again.

Conventional education was out of the question until the summer holidays, emphasized NRW School Minister Yvonne Gebauer (FDP). Classes must be divided, rooms must be occupied differently, so not all students will go to school every day. However, it is important that teachers be able to maintain personal contact with students. “We want us to be able to bring all schoolchildren to school, regardless of intervals, until the summer break,” Gebauer said. In NRW alone, that would be 2.5 million children and teens.

In the structure known to date, the school was a large event of several hundred people that lasted several hours a day. Children and teens who sit together, mingle in the hallways, and during breaks are, by current standards, a horror to virologists and epidemiologists who continue to urge from a distance. Schools “remain at high risk of infection, especially as social spaces,” warned Brandenburg Prime Minister Dietmar Woidke (SPD).

Therefore, a gradual return to school life is a great risk. According to Federal Parent Council President Stephan Wassmuth, schools are not yet equipped for this. “The truth is that it is out of the question that schools can fix their often-deteriorated sanitary facilities before May 4 in the way that would be necessary in this pandemic situation.” Hot water is often lacking in bathrooms – “I don’t even want to talk about sinks in classrooms.” For many years very little had been done: “This is now paying off.”

Teacher associations, such as VBE and GEW, are skeptical of an earlier return to school before May 4 and warn that health protection has absolute priority and that facilities should not be opened if they are unable to comply with the hygiene standards. The president of the Union for Education and Science (GEW), Marlies Tepe, warned against “taking the final exams now we are going to hell we are going.”

Schools and municipalities as school authorities must now clarify what can be implemented on the site. In North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, teachers will only return to schools starting Monday and develop hygiene and space use plans. High school graduates can decide whether to prepare for exams in their schools from 23 April or if they prefer to study at home if they feel more comfortable.

In Lower Saxony, Minister of Culture Grant Hendrik Tonne (SPD) presented a schedule on Thursday, according to which grades one and two, five to eight and eleven should start with at least rudimentary face-to-face classes between the end of May and the beginning of June , the third classes possibly already on May 18. Tonne said age groups, who have not yet returned to school, as well as “all students who have to stay home due to their health situation” would receive study plans and homework from their teachers to “learn at home “

This emergency solution will continue to be the method of choice in the federal states where summer holidays start in June, including: Berlin, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia and Brandenburg. The problems of teaching the final classes, at least to some extent, are big enough. German schools will undoubtedly undergo the grand crown experiment in the coming weeks.

Many teachers belong to the risk group.

This applies to the correct composition of the learning groups into which the classes must be divided. This also applies to the use of teachers, of which only a part is available. Older educators, who belong to the so-called vulnerable age groups, will stay at home, as well as teachers who belong to other risk groups.

This is a factor that will be one of the limiting factors for schooling at Corona in Hamburg, for example. In the Hanseatic city, it is said that at the Hamburg city hall, a relatively large number of teachers were at risk. The GEW teachers union has already emphasized that “employees belonging to risk groups cannot work on the premises.”

However, unlike other federal states, the Hamburg school authorities want to start teaching for the final classes on April 27. This should give students as much time as possible to prepare for the upcoming exams. The “middle class” principle should apply in the Hanseatic city as in many other federal states. Consequently, only half of a school class must participate in classroom instruction to comply with the crown distance rules. The change of the two fixed groups should be done daily or weekly.

Another problem is the mere supply of disinfectants and disinfectant dispensers to schools, which until now are not sufficiently available in all countries, in all cities, in all schools.

Schleswig-Holstein school authorities were delighted when a load of 2,000 of these disinfectant distributors was delivered a few days ago. However, they have not yet been evenly distributed among the 792 schools in the country, which until now have been more or less well equipped and assembled there. This remains one of the minor structural problems that school authorities, often municipalities, will have to solve in the coming weeks.

Until the reopening of its schools on May 4, Lower Saxony, for example, wants to develop a “hygiene concept for schools” adapted to the crown crisis, which should apply to all educational institutions in the state. A “model hygiene plan for the challenges of the crown crisis” will be issued “on short notice,” according to a press release from the Lower Saxony Ministry of Culture.

Considerable organizational effort will also mean transporting students to schools in groups as small as possible while observing distance rules. School bus and public transportation schedules must be tailored to corrected schedules as well as college work hours.

In order to solve the important logistical problems associated with the resumption of classroom instruction, the German Association of Cities, the District Council and the Association of German Cities and Towns have urged Ministers of Education to immediately involve organizations local umbrellas in the relevant planning. “Without the involvement of school authorities and school transportation authorities, the measures will not be implementable,” says a letter from the three organizations to the President of the Conference of Ministers of Education, which is available to WELT.

Regardless of all the practical problems that the individual federal states, but above all the municipal school authorities have to solve in the next two or three weeks: the German Minister of Culture agrees on one thing: even in those grades that should start to teach again, Everyday school life “after Corona” will have little to do with “before Corona”. “The classes that will take place until the summer holidays will, of course, be different,” announced the president of the Conference of Ministers of Education, Stefanie Hubig (Rhineland-Palatinate, SPD). For example, “working at home” may alternate with “working at school.”

As uncertain as the coming weeks seem, NRW School Minister Gebauer cites encouraging examples: Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate have already passed their Abitur exams “in the most extreme conditions,” the free Democrat said. There, the Abitur “went smoothly.”