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Thousands of students returned to face-to-face classes in Germany on Monday after a mandatory five-week break for the coronavirus. The reopening of school activity, however, has not been uniform and only concerns students from the second year of secondary school , a level that should be reached by 12 years.

Federal and regional education ministers will discuss on Wednesday how to proceed to the lower levels , where social distancing measures are more difficult to enforce and enforce. Faced with the challenge of combining teaching with the hygiene and safety measures in force, it is expected that the authorities will only agree, as they did on the 27th in the case of the elderly, a framework plan for each center to develop your own plan according to your possibilities .

"More than classes themselves, they are contacts between teachers and students," says Carsten Koloswi, head of studies at the Joachim-Friedrich Institute in Magdeburg. Given the lack of space to divide classes and the impossibility of duplicating teachers, this center has chosen to invite small groups of students each week : a maximum of six students in each classroom, in seats separated by at least 1.5 meters.

According to the information gathered by local media, the return to classes has been made drop by drop and will continue in tutorials until the summer holidays . The roadmap devised by schools is similar. "We have called them contact weeks," in which teachers review the work done by the students, answer questions and plan , says Hesse Culture Minister Alexander Lorz.

There are no data on how many of the 11 million children and adolescents of compulsory school age in Germany attended class on Monday, and there are no projections of how many will attend before the end of the course, given the voluntary nature of these tutorials in small groups. Chancellor Angela Merkel has only required that all students return to school at least once before final exams .

The only common protocol applied throughout the country refers to hygiene. The classes used and the common spaces must be disinfected daily and the rules for distance must be strictly observed. There will be no sports or music classes, nor any other subjects that require a certain closeness.

Among the hygiene standards agreed by the conference of ministers of education is not the mandatory use of face masks in schools, but it is in all school buses . In the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, it has been the German Red Cross that has ensured that students who board these vehicles wear protection. They have distributed 150,000 masks to bus drivers so that they can keep them in reserve or distribute them to those who do not wear them.

Teachers' unions, meanwhile, have asked administrations for more support in the face of the challenge of maintaining a minimum of teaching activity and maximum safety and hygiene measures . "Administrations have to adequately equip schools with sanitizers and disinfectants. They cannot leave us alone in the face of so much responsibility," said the president of the Association for Education and Training (VBE), Udo Beckmann.

The federal head of Family, Franziska Giffey, meanwhile, has again asked for patience from parents and has ensured that children will not miss the course , especially those who must prepare for entry to university.

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  • Germany
  • Angela Merkel
  • Education
  • Back to school
  • Coronavirus
  • Covid 19

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