[ad_1]
Go back to homeschooling, go back to teaching in the shift system, or should I carry on with the massively criticized business as usual? During the deliberations of Chancellor Angela Merkel and the prime ministers of the federal states this Wednesday, the stricter crown rules in Germany’s schools will be a central point. There are several, sometimes powerful, demands on how they could be viewed in detail. Even among federal state ministers of culture, resistance to a model of change is crumbling under increasing pressure, at least a little.
Federal Education Minister Anja Karliczek has spoken out in favor of a partial return to homeschooling. “Class switching should be considered, especially in the upper grades, if the burden of infection is very high in the respective region,” the CDU politician told the newspapers of the Funke media group. Alternate instruction means that, for example, in a continuous small group system, students learn only on a daily or weekly basis in face-to-face classes in schools. The rest is done at home, ideally digitally.
Even the Chancellery is pressing
Various parent-teacher associations such as the Association for Parenting and Education (VBE) have been urging ministers of education to switch to this model for months. The minimum distance in the classroom and thus the necessary protection against infection can only be observed in small groups. Everything else is “adventurous”. In order to reduce contacts, the Foreign Ministry also recently urged moving more of the lessons home. Otherwise, after the sobering development of new corona infections, despite the closure of restaurants, leisure and cultural facilities, there is no chance the second corona wave will subside, Chancellor Helge Braun warned.
The 16 ministers of education of the federal states, for their part, had insisted until the end that schools, unlike the spring, should remain open as long as possible despite the pandemic and that children should be schooled in the place, with the full schedule. This is the best way to implement the right to education. Politicians have been repeating this almost like a mantra since the end of the summer holidays, especially in the sense of equal opportunities. Otherwise, children from socially disadvantaged families threatened to be left behind.
Lack of staff and rooms
Several country heads had also warned that the lessons in the alternate model with middle classes would fail due to implementation if part of the schedule was not removed. Lack of staff and rooms. Additionally, there is a widespread complaint that many schools are far from set up to teach digitally. Even after a change on Friday, the culture ministers persist in keeping schools open in principle, but are willing to give in. For schools located in so-called hotspots, the following measures should be possible, as the Permanent Conference (KMK) circles announced on Monday:
-
Schools particularly affected by the infection process should be able to switch to continuous classroom teaching in smaller learning groups from grade 11 onwards. You must ensure that all students can be reached. Final classes should stay in face-to-face classes as much as possible.
-
In a second step, it should be possible to extend these exceptions to the lower grades in secondary schools. However, the ministers did not set a fixed figure for the number of infections from which it should be applied.
-
To curb the onset of infection, school politicians also propose a requirement mask in the classroom, as applied in some states, initially for senior high school and vocational schools, possibly also for the lower grades of schools high schools.
-
In schools where there are corona cases, there should be more timely testing.
-
The start of lessons can be staggered to reduce the risk of infection in local transport. Therefore, municipalities should offer special school transportation with the help of private companies.
Hotel rooms and coaches should help
Karl Lauterbach, an SPD health expert, recently discussed the way to school. In addition to a division into face-to-face and digital lessons, the risk of infection must be reduced, he told the “Rheinische Post.” »It is paradoxical that crowded school buses and trams are fueling the number of infections and, at the same time, many coach companies fear for their existence. You should get in right now and take local public transportation to schools and take the bus back. “
CDU presidential candidate Friedrich Merz suggested that the lessons be moved to hotel rooms. “You could move to hotels or other large rooms, and schools could offer lessons in shifts,” Merz told the “Tagesspiegel.” It’s crucial to keep the number of missed lessons as low as possible, according to Merz. “The damage that otherwise occurs cannot be repaired with money.” Those responsible would have to develop more imagination on how to continue with the lessons.
Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) advocated sending the entire class into home isolation when an infection occurs, rather than just the people sitting next to them, as used to be the case before. To prevent more and more students from being quarantined, Spahn said, the isolation must be lifted after a negative rapid test on the fifth day.
Full school closures are considered unlikely
During deliberations last Monday, the federal-state group had not yet been able to agree on new rules for schools. In their motion for a resolution for Wednesday’s deliberations, Prime Ministers are now calling for a mask requirement to be introduced starting at grade 7, but not at the national level, but only in those regions where the number of new infections exceeds the 50 per 100,000 inhabitants in seven days »clearly« exceeds. Infection-free schools should be able to be excluded from this.
According to the will of the Prime Minister, the federal states should decide for themselves on homeschooling. This would take into account the fact that measures can be adapted to very different regional infections.
It is now conceivable that the round will follow the KMK on Wednesday and reduce classroom teaching for higher levels and vocational schools. The advantage: with older students, parents do not have to stay home to care for them. Other possible steps are to extend the Christmas holidays forward or backward, depending on the country circles. In North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, schools close two days earlier.
It is highly unlikely that the Merkel group can agree to completely close schools in Germany. Finding a viable compromise is difficult for a number of reasons. On the one hand, the right of children to education and the protection of school officials against infection remain mutually exclusive. On the other hand, the situation of the study on the role of children, adolescents and schools in the corona pandemic is not entirely clear. Professional opinions also differ.
The director of the Institute of Virology at the University Hospital of Düsseldorf, Jörg Timm, told the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” that he considered that the previous attitude of the federal states, according to which the schools were not drivers of the pandemic, “is no longer sustainable “. The Leopoldina National Academy of Sciences, which also advises the Foreign Ministry, emphasized in a letter to the country’s leaders: “Schoolchildren are an essential part of the contagion process.”
Pediatricians: “Leave Schools Open”
The German Academy of Child and Adolescent Medicine made an urgent request in a statement on Monday, shortly before the switch between federal and federal state: “Leave schools open.” Data shows that infections are passed from adults to children much more often than vice versa. Schools “are not critical points in the pandemic, even in the current stage of the second wave.” At the same time, the closure of schools in the spring had dire consequences for children, from educational deficits to jeopardizing the well-being of the child.
The Hamburg school authorities had also presented a study according to which the risk of infection for children and adolescents is lower in whatever school it is. Notably, students under the age of twelve are only half as likely to be infected as older ones, but no more than adults. This dovetails with a large-scale data analysis by pediatricians around the Passau Children’s Clinic chief physician, Matthias Keller, from which there is no indication of a high number of unreported coronaviruses among children.
“There is no doubt that children and adolescents can become infected and also transmit the virus,” said a statement, as reported by the “Passauer Neue Presse” on Monday. However, there are “clear indications that most sources of infection are outside the school area.” Doctors conclude from their research “that the risk of infection in schools is greatly overestimated.” This is also indicated by the results of studies from other countries, which suggested that teachers are not at increased risk of infection.
The education ministers of the federal states want to provide data at the national level on the situation of the crown in schools once a week, as announced on Monday by the president of KMK, Stefanie Hubig (SPD), in a conversation with journalists. Until now it has been difficult to get an exact picture of the number of schools closed, corona infections among teachers, students and those affected in quarantine, because the data was collected differently in the federal states and was not centrally recorded.
The latest known KMK figures are from November 12. At that time, nearly 200,000 of the roughly 11 million students and 13,000 of the roughly 800,000 teachers were in quarantine. 106 of the more than 30,000 schools were closed completely.
