Do many schools have to deal with school cancellations after the Christmas holidays?
Current government guidelines require a classroom to be quarantined if three or more infections have been identified. It is not yet known how much class cancellations this led to immediately after the Christmas holidays. The Department of Education only reports monthly figures on the number of complete school closures. This turned out to be limited on 3 December, during the last measuring point: in primary education, 28 of the 7,358 establishments (0.4 percent) were temporarily closed, in secondary education 25 of the 1,653 establishments (1.5 percent). The latest figures from December, in which schools had to close a week before the Christmas holidays, will be published shortly.
At data platform Corona Locator, a private initiative that registers infections in schools, reported on Monday only two schools with positively tested students or teachers.
In reality, this number will be much higher, emphasizes initiator and ICT entrepreneur Bart Bolkestein. ‘Schools are not obliged to report class cancellations and it usually takes a while before they have processed the reports in their own system. My experience so far has been that it is often quiet for the first few days after the holiday, a kind of calm before the storm, and then it erupts.’
Does a school arrange a replacement if a teacher drops out?
Most schools are able to ‘completely or largely compensate for school drop-outs’, wrote former Minister of Primary and Secondary Education Arie Slob to the House of Representatives in December. Nevertheless, especially schools in the large cities, where the teacher shortage is most acute, find it difficult to arrange replacements in the event of dropout.
‘The demand is so enormous that we can only fulfill a small part’, says Jasper van de Vooren. He is director of De Brede Selection, the urban substitute pool for public school boards in Amsterdam. ‘There are sixty to seventy teachers in our group. This allows us to meet approximately 30 percent of the requests. The rest is taken care of by dividing classes or sending them home.’
Can teachers with mild corona complaints or who are in quarantine continue to work?
“Teachers who feel fit and are not ill, but who are at home because of the corona measures, usually provide distance education,” says Eke Wolters, spokesperson for The Hague Schools, a foundation with 52 schools for primary and special education from the royal city. fall under. “This was also the case during previous corona waves.”
The coming weeks will show whether positively tested teachers can continue to teach (online) more often in practice, because the omnikron variant generally causes milder complaints than previous variants.
Distance learning is not always feasible for teachers who have children of their own, says Claudia Verhoeven of the PO council, which represents the interests of primary education. “If the teacher has to be quarantined, then the whole family has to go to quarantine and it will be difficult to keep teaching.”
The Ministry of Education writes on its website that the choice of distance learning “is emphatically the professional choice of the school” and that it “cannot be enforced by individual parents or guardians”.
Isn’t it better to end the quarantine obligation for teachers who have been pricked and boosted?
In Belgium, fully vaccinated people (including the booster shot) no longer need to be quarantined after close contact with an infected person. Testing is also not necessary as long as the person has no complaints. According to the Belgian government, the new policy is necessary to keep enough people at work in the event of rising infection rates. Whether the Netherlands will follow suit will become clear later this week. “The OMT will then specifically discuss the quarantine policy in situations where important social functions are endangered,” said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health. “We are waiting for this advice.”
The education unions do not make any statements about whether they are in favor of celebrating the quarantine guidelines. ‘We are not virologists,’ says Thijs Roovers, director of the General Education Association. ‘We do notice that there is huge division among educational staff, just like in the rest of society, about whether or not schools should be kept open. Many teachers were eager to get back to work after the holidays, but there is also a group that is concerned about the current number of infections.’