The relief is great in many places: Starting Monday, the 1.6 million students in Bavaria will be able to go back to school. The Minister of Culture Michael Piazolo assured on Monday evening on Bavarian television. “We want face-to-face lessons, we had face-to-face lessons, we will start face-to-face classes in the next week like other federal states,” he said. At least for the time being, there will be no nationwide homeschooling.
There is applause even from the opposition. “I’m very enthusiastic. Our children have been held liable long enough,” says the chairman of the education committee, Markus Bayerbach (AfD). The education policy spokesman for the FDP, Matthias Fischbach, speaks somewhat more cautiously of a “step in the right direction”. Meanwhile, his colleague Simone Strohmayr (SPD) sees the worst averted for the time being: “School closings would be intolerable,” she says. “That would lead to a total breakdown in many children.”
The uncertainty about how things will continue after the Christmas holidays at the more than 6000 schools in the Free State had recently been great with the arrival of the highly contagious Omikron variant. Teachers’ associations had also warned to keep schools open at all costs. The chairman of the German Teachers’ Association, Hans-Peter Meidinger, affirmed that more schools will have to close in the future with Omikron. Admittedly after a case-by-case examination by the local health department and not as a nationwide political order – there has been no legal basis for this at the federal level since the epidemic situation came to an end.
Nevertheless, thousands of students were sitting at home in Bavaria in December. The Ministry of Health had decreed that if an omicron is suspected, the entire class must be quarantined, including vaccinated students. There is correspondingly great concern that the regulation will paralyze Bavarian schools in the coming weeks if the apparently relatively tame, but highly contagious virus variant takes hold. To prevent this, the education ministers of the federal states want to join forces on Wednesday. On Friday, the federal and state governments want to advise on shortening quarantine periods, among other things. Fischbach advocates consistency in the Free State: “The same issues should be decided immediately by the health authorities.”
The UK and US have had more children hospitalized since Omikron was last. However, experts attribute this mainly to chance diagnoses and the high contagiousness of the variant. German pediatricians had in a joint statement recently given the all-clear. According to new findings, the severity of the disease in all age groups is well below that of the delta variant, according to the experts. In Bavaria are so far according to the data from the Robert Koch Institute 60 percent of 12 to 17 year olds already vaccinated for the first time, 54 percent completely. In the case of children between the ages of five and eleven, it is only a fraction of more than 80,000 so far. The resentment of many parents is great, many actually fear long-disproved long-term consequences such as infertility.
Others fear the virus above all and are struggling to even send their child to school in the coming week. Simone Fleischmann, President of the Bavarian Teachers’ Association (BLLV) reports that she receives “letters in a row” from concerned parents who want to take their children off sick leave. The school year will “have nothing of normalcy, neither from the parents, nor from the teachers ‘and students’ point of view,” she predicts. The spokesman for the Bavarian high school teachers, Michael Schwägerl, fears something similar. “We don’t want to operate with alternating lessons, partial openings and partial closings for months,” he says.
On? To? Or would you rather just open it up a bit? In the BR discussion, the Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs did not allow himself to be carried away to make a clear statement about how things will continue in the longer term. “After two years of Corona, we should have learned that we cannot plan months in advance,” he said. You have to “closely watch” the development of Omikron. An unsatisfactory appearance for many parents, but also an honest one – in which Fleischmann missed a clear announcement to lower expectations. The Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs wrote a letter to the teachers to exercise a sure instinct for the curriculum and the number of rehearsals. “Writing the soft nuances does not change the learning and performance culture in the sharp Bavarian selection system,” she complains.
Fleischmann also refuses to leave schools open across the board. “If the crew is not there, the flight will be canceled,” she says. In other words, if too many teachers are in quarantine or on sick leave, homeschooling has to be done after all. Its success then depends on “Visavid”, a video conference system from Auctores from Neumarkt in the Upper Palatinate. The program works in a similar way to Microsoft Teams, but is considered more data protection-proof and does not need to be installed separately. Fischbach (FDP) advocates subjecting the program to a stress test in good time to prevent the server from crashing. When it comes down to it, “Visavid should be up and running,” he says.