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Substantial progress on safety issues in schools is needed to prevent a strike, warned the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland (ASTI).
The union’s executive committee met on Friday to consider the outcome of a member vote in favor of industrial action, including strikes, over safety concerns at schools.
The committee was informed that “engagement” with the Department of Education and public health authorities has been “improved, and several clarifications have been provided. This commitment is expected to continue.
However, ASTI President Ann Piggott said “substantial progress” on school safety issues was needed to prevent industrial action.
These steps include faster testing and follow-up response times, a redefinition of close contacts, IT resources for students and teachers to facilitate continuity of learning, and reasonable accommodations for teachers in “high risk” categories.
“We need a lot more progress to get to the point where teachers believe that the safety of students and teachers is being prioritized during this pandemic,” he said.
ASTI said it will periodically review progress as the engagement continues.
In a separate vote, ASTI members voted to take industrial action for equal pay for equal work, to be taken in conjunction with one or both of the other teachers’ unions.
Combined effort
In a statement, ASTI said it will contact the other teacher unions, INTO and TUI, in order to seek a joint effort to end the pay inequality scandal.
“The current teacher shortage crisis is the result of an unfair pay gap that cannot be allowed to continue. The affected teachers have a different pay scale than their peers throughout their careers, ”said Ms. Piggott.
“This destructive policy has caused a drop in morale and exacerbated a recruitment and retention crisis in second-level education. We will seek to work with INTO and TUI to end wage inequality ”.
The Department of Education, meanwhile, has pledged to implement a renewed testing and tracing regime in schools beginning next Monday.
School teams will be established in each Health Service Executive (HSE) area to help ensure faster response and contact tracing when cases are detected.
Meanwhile, public health authorities have said that the most recent data indicates that schools are safe environments with very low rates of Covid-19 transmission.
Dr. Abigail Collins, a consultant in public health medicine, told an HSE news conference Thursday that the latest figures are very reassuring and show that schools, in general, are not incubators of the disease.
Cases detected
HSE data from earlier this week indicates that 599 cases of Covid-19 have been detected among pupils or staff at primary or secondary schools since they reopened in late August.
At the foot of these cases, just over 15,000 staff members and students were evaluated after risk assessments that identified them as a close contact.
These tests revealed an additional 384 cases, or 2.5 percent of all cases analyzed.
The HSE said this compares with a positivity rate of about 10 percent from close contacts in the community.
The difference between positivity rates in schools and the community is seen as an encouraging sign that schools are not “amplifying” transmission of the virus.
A further breakdown of these figures shows that positivity rates after close contact testing are highest in special education schools (3.3%), followed by elementary schools (2.7%) and high schools. (2%).
Dr. Collins said this positive data from schools was reflected in the national age data, which shows that the proportion of children contracting the virus has remained stable since schools reopened.
While 14.5 percent of the cases were in children between the ages of four and 18 in August, that number rose slightly to 14.9 percent in September and 15.6 percent in October.
Overall, he said most of the evidence indicates that students or staff with Covid-19 contracted the virus in the community or within their families rather than in a school setting.
For example, available evidence suggested that transmission of the virus within the school occurred in less than 2% of schools in the country, or 70 of around 4,000 elementary and secondary schools.
While teacher unions have raised concerns about “inconsistencies” in the definition of what constitutes close contact between schools, Dr. Collins explained that each case is different and that the “soft” information collected by the teams Public health can lead to different conclusions about the number of close contacts.
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