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ARCHIVED - Staggered return to school in the Murcia Region
There are daily challenges to overcome but thousands of teachers will be doing everything possible to work through this crisis and make the best of a bad situation
The beginning of the "most complex and atypical school year of any we have ever experienced," said regional education minister Esperanza Moreno, inaugurating the start of the school year in Murcia on Monday.
Almost six months to the day after Spain went into lockdown, children have started to return to school here in the Murcia region.
The first 70,000 Infantil and Primaria students returned to school on Monday and the remaining pupils will return on a staggered basis throughout the week, until by next Monday, all 280,000 will have completed the process.
It’s a school year plagued with doubts, uncertainty and criticism, as the educational authorities attempt to chart a course somewhere between the overwhelming need to get children back into an organised environment in which they can rebuild friendship and community bonds, and resume their learning process, all the while jumping from one stepping stone to another as the schools attempt to keep them safe, calm their anxieties and the stress of this whole surreal situation and cope with the family dramas that are inevitable as parents try to juggle work commitments, financial insecurity and cope with the uncertainties caused by the current situation.
Schools have been re-organised, pupils enter via one door and via another, classes have been staggered, group sizes reduced, classes split with pupils attending on different days, additional teachers hired to cover for quarantines and sickness, tablets purchased to enable telematic tuition, social distancing enforced, handwashes installed, signage installed all over the schools…….everything within the resources of the educational authorities is being done to try and keep the children safe and resume as much “normality” as is possible in these exceptional circumstances.
Of course there are complaints, with groups representing teachers concerned about some of the arrangements, and groups representing parents criticising the split system as being unworkable for working families and opposition politicians criticising every aspect of everything, but there is no choice other than to try and make the best of the situation and hope for a gradual improvement in the evolution of the virus as we move into next year.
The lack of technological means to teach students telematically was also the subject of complaints from the unions, who complained about the delay in getting tablets distributed in municipalities forced to confine, saying it was , "inexcusable in the face of possible non-face-to-face scenarios." The tablets for the confined municipalities began to arrive yesterday in Jumilla and Archivel; Lorquí will receive them on Tuesday, and Lorca and Totana throughout the week. Lorca was only put into confinement on Monday, so it is unrealistic to expect tablets to be available on the same day. There are also 3,000 computers with 'webcams' to be installed for teaching classes by 'streaming' still awaiting installation.
The key challenge for the educational authorities is to maintain some form of continuity in the education of young people during the next few months and of course, there will be many challenges through this autumn.
Yesterday, for example, one school in San Javier ( the colegio Joaquín Valverde) reported that only a quarter of the 464 Infantil pupils actually came to school and that a number of parents presented medical certificates alleging that their children were medically unfit to attend class.”we’re not doctors, so we don´t know if the children really are sick enough to not attend school and follow classes telematically,” said the director in an interview with the Spanish media.
Last week schools in other areas of Spain returned to school a week before Murcia and there were similar issues across the country, with parents choosing not to take their children to class. This is illegal, but the authorities will try and prove that it is safe for children to attend school and that psychologically they are better off in this environment with their friends and the support of the educational system.
There will be instances of classes being quarantined; throughout the last week this has been occurring all over Spain. Yesterday the education minister admitted that there 212 “incidents” across Spain, most of them relating to positives in teachers or pupils forcing the quarantine of bubble groups, classes and in one case, the closure of an entire school.(see national statistics for Monday which contains headlines from across the country)
In Murcia yesterday, there was one incident in which a pupil awaiting the results of a PCR test was turned away from a school, but the remainder of the return to school proceeded smoothly.
Inevitably there will be incidents and it’s not going to be easy for anyone, least of all head teachers who must try and keep all the balls in the air and parents who must maintain positivity whilst trying to cope with the disruption and uncertainty caused by this crisis.
Image1: Ayto: Torre Pacheco; Image 2; Ayto-San Pedro del Pinatar
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