“It was high time,” appreciates a mother, visibly relieved. At the exit of the Gustave-Roch elementary public school in Nantes, smiles were read on the faces of the children on Monday afternoon. In Loire-Atlantique, as in 46 other French departments, the mask is no longer mandatory for students from CP to CM2 given an incidence rate stabilized below the threshold of 50 cases of Covid per 100,000 inhabitants. The end of a constraint suffered for almost a year.
” That’s great ! exclaims Sa’diyyah, in CM2. We breathe better, we speak easily. And then we really see each other when we laugh. ” ” It’s cool ! We were fed up with the mask, ”confirms Yanis, a CE1 student. Inès, who arrived in this school in September, discovered this Monday the faces of her classmates in CE2 almost for the first time. “It’s funny,” she says. We are not used to discussing without a mask. “” Me, it really shocked me this morning, said Sa’diyyah. We are so used to having it that I forgot that it was no longer mandatory. I only took it off once when I got to the yard! And that feels weird. “
“Worried about the transmission of the virus”
Like children, most parents are also delighted with the measure. “This is very good news,” comments Nene, Sa’diyyah’s mother. It feels good to be able to see their facial expressions. Even though they eventually got used to it, the mask couldn’t last forever. It stifled them I think. “Yanis’ father also considers that it” hurt my heart “to” leave them in the morning with the mask “. “The start was difficult,” he recalls. I have a son who cried because he couldn’t see the reactions on people’s faces. “Louise’s mother shares this opinion, even if she admits that her daughter had” finally adapted very well “.
But other parents view the end of mask wearing in class with less enthusiasm. “I am mixed, admits Nolwen, the mother of Inès. On the one hand, I know well that with the long days that the children made the mask was really not ideal. I even think it had negative consequences on learning. On reading, vocabulary acquisition, for example. On the other hand, I am a little worried about the transmission of the virus. Without a mask, students are necessarily more exposed to contamination. I have already had two false positives at home. I don’t really want to go through it again. “The instructions change all the time, so we don’t have much choice but to adapt,” breathes another mother. Until then, the mask was not compulsory anywhere before 11 years old but it was in school from CP, so from 6 years old. I also have a son who is in 5th grade, in college, and he has to keep it in class. It is really not easy to understand. “
The teachers, them, keep the mask
In middle and high schools, the rules for wearing masks indoors for students remain unchanged. As for teachers and staff, they must also keep the mask in class, even in elementary school. “I prefer it to be like this. It is more reassuring that adults keep their masks for the moment ”, estimates Nolwen, the mother of Inès (CE2)
In parallel, the Snuipp-FSU first union of school teachers, “asks the ministry to ramp up saliva tests for the 6 million primary school students who are currently only offered up to 300,000 per week when it would take 20 times more to implement the recommendations of the scientific council ”. Currently a case of Covid in a primary school class leads to a closure