Spain became the first country in Western Europe to receive half a million confirmed coronavirus infections on Monday, with its highest daily case count since May on Friday.
To prevent the spread in schools, the country’s government enacted rules in late August: all students aged six or over must wear masks in class; The size of the class has to be reduced; Students have to be kept in the “bubbles” assigned to them to prevent mixing; The desk must be located at a distance of at least 1.5 m; All schools must improve open-air ventilation, and provide hand disinfection stations.
The new Covid-19 rules, however, risk widening the gap between rich and poor, increasing the disparity between private and public schools, especially in Madrid’s severely affected neighborhood.
In the Spanish capital, the British Council School – a private fee-paying institution – had already built a new open-air extension in its cafeteria when the new Covid-19 guidelines were announced.
It is now installing six pre-fabricated mobile classrooms and to keep students in safety bubbles, its playground has been turned into a rainbow-colored labyrinth of plastic dividers.
“It forces you to think creatively, to look differently from space and to see what the basics of learning are,” explains the head of the school Mercedes Hernandez.
Hernandez acknowledges that his school is in a privileged position. “Technology, a huge campus and beautiful Spanish weather give us the option to learn a lot in a lot of different places,” he tells CNN.
On a visit to its suburban campus, Hernandez introduced the school’s head nurse, Inmaculada Hernandez, who is busy training two smiling nurses who joined her team before the new school year.
They are just some of the new staff hired by the school to help shoulder the burden caused by the Covid-19 protocol: special classes, testing and health checks.
The nursing station is equipped with hand sanitizers, masks, face-screens and thermometers. Hernandez has raised the pink liquid in our hands, it is the golden proportion in the antiseptic gels that he assures us.
Hernandez says the school is earning the most out of its good fortune. Before the government issued the guidelines quickly – it was able to act quickly – because it attracted the experience of other British Council schools, especially in China.
“In January and February, the school, seeing the possible scenarios, began to form an event management team – what would happen, and what would we do?” Says Hernandez. “We didn’t know it would come to Italy in a few weeks, and then we had it.”
The school exposes inequalities
The difference between Madrid’s private and public schools is quite evident in the working class area to the south, where the virus has grown the fastest in recent weeks.
In the neighborhood of Lagness, Aben Hamza Public School has a cracked concrete playground, and steel shutters on the windows.
Maria Carmen Morillaz of the National Parents Association says the classes here can easily outperform government guidelines by more than 0 students.
But there are no builders here who are already making extensions in well-ventilated classrooms, and no orientation programs for new staff. That is because the budget is still being processed.
“The delay has led to distrust, obviously,” he says. “What is absolutely necessary is a financial investment: not after weeks and weeks of waiting, teachers now need to take a job from day one.”
The municipal government of Madrid finally allocated 37 370 million (43 7,437 million) for Covid-19 measures in schools in late August, promising to employ 11,000 new teachers. But the news came too late for many of the city’s schools, which had to be delayed until the start of the school year.
Teachers are also frustrated.
“No further plans have been made,” says Laura McGregor, an English teacher at a private school in Madrid whose own children attend a public school in the city center.
“We knew the virus would still be with us in September – it should have had plans from July so that school administrators had time to prepare,” he says.
“Now, they’re working twenty-four hours a day without thinking or thinking. It’s going to be really chaotic, the first few weeks of the term.”
Worst of all, if classes cannot be run safely, Morilaz, a representative of the parents’ association, worries that public school students may be forced to return to online learning. She fears she will lag behind her peers in private schools who will be able to stay open.
Morillas has four children – and only one computer, all of which she had to share for classes at the epidemic.
“The screen isn’t the school,” he says frankly.
“This has created a digital gap in the last few months that has made the social divide even bigger, a problem that has now become more and more complex.”
The epidemic is also highlighting inequality in other European countries.
.
