The bad news for the Haack family came at 6:46 p.m. via email: “Your pool result is positive.” The wait began for Nadja Haack and her nine-year-old daughter. Something like this can happen when the PCR test results of all the children in a class are collected and evaluated together. Then a second test, the individual result, must bring clarity as to whether you are actually affected yourself. There’s only one problem with that: the Haacks didn’t get a second result, explains the mother. “Like most of the class.”
The so-called pool test has been practiced at Bavaria’s elementary and special schools for a long time in order to identify corona infections in classes both reliably and efficiently: Every student takes two so-called lollipop tests twice a week shortly before the start of class, which are much more pleasant than the variant with the stick . Test number one of all students in a class is shuffled into a test set and then tested. The second tests are only evaluated if the result is positive, then separately to determine the infected person. In this second evaluation, there was a glitch at the primary school in Grafing.
19 out of 25 students in all-day class four are affected, who after the positive pool test waited in vain for the result of the second test – and now have to stay at home. Among them is Nadja Haack’s nine-year-old daughter, who is studying at home on Wednesday afternoons. Mathematics is coming up, her mother reports on the phone. Her daughter is well equipped for homeschooling, having completed the third grade almost exclusively at home. “The teacher sends teaching material via Teams chat, the child sits in front of the tablet and solves tasks,” says Haack. Her daughter can handle it, says the 39-year-old. However, that’s not all. Haack would have been on duty today. “I’m a nurse and that’s why I’m absent.”
The example of the Haack family from Grafing shows on the one hand how important a functioning test system in schools is for a functioning society. But it also makes clear the responsibility that rests on the schools and their test laboratory operators.
“In a crisis like this, you can’t manage that everything always runs one hundred percent.”
A call to Simone Fleischmann from Zorneding, who used to be a primary school director in Poing herself and has been President of the Bavarian Teachers’ Association since 2015. “Such cases are not isolated cases,” she says. In view of the overload of the laboratories and the high pressure on teachers and headmasters in the pandemic, it is also inevitable that errors or delays will occur. You know numerous similar examples as now in Grafing. In another district, for example, the pool test was positive in one class, but all individual tests were negative. Fleischmann: “In a crisis like this, it’s impossible to manage that everything always runs one hundred percent.”
Christiane Goldschmitt-Behmer, the primary school principal in Grafing, is one of thousands of Corona managers in Bavaria. Her team are teachers whose job description now includes the morning test. Not math, but Corona. Goldschmitt-Behmer reports that first and second graders always test on Mondays and Wednesdays, grades three and four on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Testing everyone at the same time, says Rector Goldschmitt-Behmer, “that would probably completely overwhelm the test laboratory.” Although the cooperation with the laboratory was not particularly characterized by communication, it had been good so far. The latest case is the first of its kind.
The corona tests of the primary school students in Grafing are evaluated by the company Eurofins. The responsible laboratory evaluates the tests and, ideally, sends the result by e-mail to the school and parents in the early evening. How high is the load in the Ebersberg laboratory and in general? How did the breakdown in Grafing come about? An SZ request from Wednesday leaves Eurofins unanswered until Thursday evening. Possibly those responsible for such answers simply lack the time.
It’s difficult for everyone involved: students, parents, teachers, principals, lab testers. “I understand parents who complain,” says Fleischmann, President of the Teachers’ Association. Nevertheless, she appeals to prudence to push less on clarifying the question of guilt in the event of breakdowns, especially since this is rarely likely to be clear. It is not very helpful, for example, if parents want to prevent their children from being tested at school. “65 headmasters and vice-principals gave up in Bavaria in 2021 because they could no longer withstand the stress of the pandemic,” says Fleischmann.
Nadja Haack did not complain. Why should she, she says during the phone call on Wednesday. You can’t blame the school, says Haack, and in general. “With all the circumstances, a lot of things aren’t going so badly,” she says. A day later, on Thursday, further results from second tests finally arrive. Including that of Nadja Haack’s nine-year-old daughter. Result: negative.