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Markus Kröger / school social worker
“You know, two of you are going to wash your hands first. Stay here. Please keep your distance! And the next two.”
The corona pandemic is omnipresent in everyday school life: masks, distance, hygiene measures; without these rules, the lessons cannot currently function.
Roswita Weber / director
“We can open the window here, but we have no current in that direction. As a result, gust ventilation, which should last several minutes, is not possible in this room.”
Stephan Wassmuth / Federal Council of Parents
“The way it works right now, that everyone is doing their thing and the school administrators are alone and the teachers are alone, that’s not a solution that we can accept. “
Anja Bensinger-Stolze / GEW Hamburg
“The school public must be informed, or else concerns and fears will increase. “
Corona has left its mark on the courtyard of the Theodor-Heuss-Realschule school in Dortmund: from above you can see markings that are supposed to show students where they should line up in groups before school starts so that classes don’t mingle. For director Roswita Weber, the pandemic means constant crisis intervention.
Roswita Weber / director
“Now I have to pay attention to how the patient enters: With certificate, without certificate, Corona sick with certificate. I have to say that as a school principal, 60 percent of my work is currently about Corona. How do I implement the measures and how do I analyze what regulatory measures to take and when? And 40 percent remains for the normal day-to-day school principal. And that is frustrating. Justice is no longer done to work, you only work under high pressure, only under high performance. There are hardly any interruptions and you still notice that you are not doing justice to the situation. Community life, social life, what really defines our profession, no longer has a place.”
Take homework supervision as an example: here, each child has their assigned place, which they now put away for weeks. Exchange is not allowed.
Markus Kröger / school social worker
“The students leave class and say, oh, now I want to sit next to my friend, for example. And then we say no, that won’t work. You can’t do that today. Rather, we have established an order at the beginning, and you have to stick to it and just sit somewhere else is not possible. And especially with the homework situation: then one person can do math better than the other. And from the point of view of logic, you would say, then I’ll go to someone who can do it and explain it to me. You can’t do that today.”
And the lunch break in the small school cafeteria is also different: everything here only works with a sophisticated shift operation to avoid contact between the class.
Markus Kröger / school social worker
“It was always crowded, it was always tight, but it was like a small family. And that’s all different now. Now I have to work on relationships with students who are at a distance. That is really a contradiction. Children should get to know each other, but should not get too close. And that’s right, really difficult. How should you know me from a distance? ”
Nationally, quite a few schools had to temporarily close entirely in the new school year. Either years or individual classes were quarantined. The authorities do not statistically record how many schools nationwide are affected. Another problem: often outdated school buildings make it difficult to implement the necessary hygiene measures.
Stephan Wassmuth / Federal Council of Parents
“And the delay in the renovation is nothing new, which has now come as a complete surprise. If you look at the numbers: in 1970 we were 43 billion D marks behind in renovating schools. We have a portfolio of € 48 billion renovation projects in 2020. So we have been driving this renovation delay for over 50 years. And of course it is really unsatisfactory, also for the teachers who are supposed to prepare the lessons together. Sometimes there are no workrooms where you can do that. There is no computer equipment, so maybe we will go. Does not exist. These are not new problems. These are decades-long problems that we have postponed and that, of course, have now caught us off guard. ”
However, the computer room at Theodor-Heuss-Schule is state-of-the-art: there is no sink, so it is not mandatory to wash hands in the classroom.
And: Sensitive computer keyboards must be cleaned with special disinfectant wipes after use, resulting in additional costs.
Roswita Weber / school management
“The masks promised for the students did not arrive. The renovations to the building did not arrive. The terminals that were promised for the students may be there in January or February. I don’t have WiFi throughout the school. If I have the terminals now, I still can’t advance. Teachers have not received further training. Teachers do not have equipment, and I do not have the opportunity to adequately fulfill my duties during the Corona period. Parents have the impression that everything is going well, that everything is structured. The possibilities are there, the money is there. But we in schools don’t care. “
There is currently no central master plan for schools. 16 education ministers, 16 hygiene concepts: sometimes masks should only be worn in the hallways, sometimes in class as well, in some federal states not at all. Hamburg was one of the first federal states to reopen schools for regular operation after the summer holidays. In recent weeks, many restless teachers have contacted the Education and Science Union.
Anja Bensinger-Stolze / GEW Hamburg
“Here someone writes: Suspected cases increased in the last week and double digit numbers of children were sent home with cold symptoms every day. It is not known if any of these have been tested and which of them were positive for Corona . Because there are none Mandatory. “
“I hope they will help me with legal protection. For example, if a colleague of ours ruins his health and gets infected at school.”
“I can hardly express my amazement at this approach in words. The motto seemed and seems to be that the beginning must be successful first. We can have the few individual cases under control.”
“Since Monday, a high school student who is in the hospital and has to be ventilated with a difficult course has also been affected. It is depressing for everyone when a student is fighting for his life. For days. The result is not yet there Clear”.
The parent-teacher associations agree on one point: that all schools in Germany close again, as in March, should be avoided as far as possible.
Anja Schulze-Bensinger / GEW Hamburg
“Of course, that is difficult if colleagues are also not informed. What really happened there? How is the situation? How do you proceed now? There is no open and transparent information. This is hard. However, I also have the impression that this is not necessarily what the authorities want either. One would like to keep these things under the table. You don’t want to give that to the public like that. It turns out that children have the virus too, and they can also be contagious. There is no use listening to the authorities, well, but they are not that contagious and they do not infect each other as much, but of course the employees, the teachers, of course they are at risk, and that is why it was already stressful at the beginning until now. It’s a permanent discomfort because you don’t know what to expect. ”
Dortmund’s Theodor-Heuss-Realschule had a positive Corona case two weeks ago. Principal Roswita Weber only had to send the infected student’s neighbors home in quarantine because the school voluntarily pledged to make sure everyone in the class wears mouth and nose protection.
Roswita Weber / director
“I think other countries have overtaken us for a long time when we see how people in Norway and Finland work. Why is that not possible here? Why does health count for so little? Why does education count for so little? And that’s what frustrates you. “
How a pandemic-compatible lesson should work with urgently scientifically recommended permanent ventilation in the cold season, there is currently no answer. It’s still complicated, even in this school year.
