“It feels like punishment,” says Maria Reiter. The high school teacher teaches sports and the Catholic religion at the College of School Brothers in Illertissen. Actually. Reiter is six months pregnant, she is currently not allowed to enter her high school. Reiter sees that the Ministry of Culture wants to protect them with this corona-related regulation. Pregnant women are still considered a risk group, too little is known about Covid and the effects on mothers or their unborn babies. Nevertheless, she feels punished – and even kept her pregnancy a secret from her boss and colleagues at the beginning so that she could teach her classes until the summer holidays. “Because I was doing really well, I didn’t tell anyone and taught both sports and religion,” says Reiter on the phone. “I was even on the Way of St. James.” It was not a permanent solution, the actually good news became a burden. In the first week of school in September, Reiter reported to her boss and has had to sit at home ever since. She is now correspondingly impatient and complains that she has been “hanging in limbo” for weeks.
On the first day of school in mid-September, the Council of Ministers overturned the ban on pregnant teachers. The shortage of teachers is having a stronger impact this year than before. And the infection process allows for a relaxation, it said. From this Tuesday onwards, the corresponding general decree will be overridden. The resource teacher is too valuable, the Ministry of Education reports 2800 pregnant women. Even if only a few return to the schools, their principals would probably breathe a sigh of relief. So far, pregnant women have been supposed to work from home, but online lessons and corrections are no substitute for school lessons. Maria Reiter, for example, complains about “twiddling her thumbs”. Although she is no longer allowed to hold sports lessons, she can teach her religion classes. Currently, only the upper school is represented by colleagues. The waiting frustrates her a lot, says the young woman. “I had hoped to be able to officially return as a pregnant woman on October 4th,” says Reiter. She’s still doing very well. Nothing will come of it.
As of Friday afternoon, the schools had not received any details on how to implement the new rule. At around 2 p.m., the Ministry of Education sent out more than 70 pages of documents. It is doubtful that many principals would have received these papers and studied them before the long weekend. It is therefore unlikely that the pregnant woman will return this Tuesday. Too many questions were left unanswered.
It was never intended that all teachers would be back in action on October 4th, according to the Ministry of Education on Friday afternoon. The principals have been informed accordingly. But those who asked around in schools heard it differently. On September 20, the ministry sent out a general letter on Covid protective measures, which briefly mentioned that it was not an “automatic process” and that school management had to check every pregnant woman and her place of work despite the waiver of the ban on entry.
Nevertheless, anger and resignation grew in the schools. It was said that one was already used to it from Corona. The Ministry of Education had often sent out new rules at short notice, and the complaints about them ran through both Corona school years. So frustration grew again among school principals because they had mostly planned the running of the school independently of pregnant colleagues. “What happens to the replacement? Can I keep it? Do I have to issue the team teachers again?” asked Walter Baier, director of the Bruckmühl grammar school and head of the directors’ association of the grammar schools.
The answer can now be found in the more than 70 pages of documents: If possible, the team teachers should now be used elsewhere at the school, who knows how long and to what extent the pregnant women could work until maternity leave. The focus is still clearly on the protection of mother and child. The school directors are to prepare two risk assessments, one that is customary and one that is “related to the event”, in which fields of activity are sounded out in detail. Pregnant women are not allowed to go to school before then. For example, teachers should primarily teach small groups. They should only take over whole classes in large rooms with good ventilation and not necessarily enter or leave the school at peak times.
Maria Reiter and others will be happy. However, teachers’ associations had warned that more careful pregnant women were now under pressure to work, and also criticized why the end of the ban on entry had not been decided earlier. Especially since an abolition was apparently already being discussed internally in the Ministry of Education in the spring. On Friday, Hans Rottbauer, head of the department for employment law in the Bavarian Teachers’ Association (BLLV), described the waiting for detailed regulations as an “unacceptable situation for school administrations” and criticized the fact that the responsibility was “shifted” onto them.
The Ministry of Culture did not want to understand the excitement: it was clear that most pregnant women would initially continue to work from home. But now headteachers are “in a position to carry out event-related risk assessments in the near future” and to bring pregnant women “successively” back to the schools. This is a “process that will certainly take some time”. Maria Reiter and her colleagues will have to wait a little longer.