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How do you say no to students who need a hug or want to take a hand on a city tour? And how do you get them to keep their distance after longing for each other?
It’s wednesday morning at the Amager Common School, a huge red brick school building on the outskirts of Copenhagen. In the staff room, a group of teachers has come together to create new schedules.
– The biggest challenge will be to make students feel safe, help them find their place when everything is so new. But also to stay away from them when they need help and comfort, says primary school teacher Marie Brøndum.
“The biggest challenge will be making students feel safe,” said teachers Marie Brøndum, Marco van den Bosch and Signe Rong Rossil.
Photo: Anders Hansson
It has been a week since the Danish government announced that the partnership will gradually reopen. The country’s schools have been closed since March 16. Now, after a month of home schooling, middle and high school students return to regular school.
Amager Community School students are very new. When students in grades 0 and 1 arrived for their first day of school earlier in the morning, they had to say goodbye to their mothers and fathers outside the school gates; parents are not allowed to enter school.
Students should wash their hands. every two hours and sit two meters away. Scissors, crayons and other common implements have been removed and all students have been divided into new and smaller classes.
– There can be a maximum of fifteen children in each class and in a certain number of square meters. The classes in turn are divided into smaller groups of five. The idea is that you should stay in your group, as isolated as possible and with the same educators to reduce the risk of infection, says Signe Rong Rossil, class director in grade 2.
The schoolyard has been divided into smaller zones, one for each class. Here students should be on breaks, but also during other parts of the day, according to the recommendations of the National Board of Health and the Government, as much of the teaching as possible should be done outdoors.
Students queue to wash their hands.
Photo: Anders Hansson
According to Chancellor Torben Bo Højman Jensen, the biggest challenge has been putting the school in order according to the rules of the National Board of Health.
– We are, after all, a city center school that will suddenly carry out an outdoor education for six hundred students. Although we have made a desk plan, we don’t know how it works in practice. That is why we have chosen to open the school for a few classes at a time, to see how children react, he says.
Generally approaching 900 students at the school. In the first stage, only grades 0-5 can be returned.
Many Danish parents have reacted to the fact that schools are the first sectors of society to reopen when the government is now easing restrictions.
“Our children are not guinea pigs,” says the head of a naming meeting that has received nearly 20,000 signatures in a short space of time, with parents demanding that the government reconsider.
Many children are happy that the schools reopen. Among the parents there are many who are critical: “Our children are not guinea pigs.
Photo: Anders Hansson
According to Signe Rong Rossil, himself a mother of three children, some parents fear that the children will become infected or continue infection. However, she herself thinks that it is good for school work to start again.
– I think that community for children is very important, that they can learn together. Although home schooling has been intensive, I don’t think knowledge remains the same.
– And although it was good that the community closed in many ways, I know that it has not been good for all children. There are students I’ve been concerned about, who don’t have the same conditions for learning at home as the others, she says.
In year one is Time for a break. Students line up to the restrooms and wash their hands, more or less carefully. Meanwhile, some of them are singing a song:
“Wash your hands, wash your hands, soap, soap.”
