“It’s very complicated when you have a supervising minister who explains that everything is going well, that there is a form of denial of reality and that he does not realize that on the ground things are not going so well that, that it’s not that easy “, deplores Catherine Da Silva, director of the Taos Amrouche elementary school in Saint-Denis and representative of the SNUipp-FSU union in Seine-Saint-Denis, Tuesday January 4 on franceinfo. Schools were notified on Sunday afternoon for Monday, the day of the start of the school year, of the establishment of a new health protocol to fight the Covid-19 epidemic.
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franceinfo: How did this first day go in your school?
At first, I told myself that everything was going to be fine because I was lucky to have all my teachers present. And then, throughout the day, it completely deteriorated. The first observation was that we were missing a lot of students, three to four per class so that figures pretty quickly for my school. And then the parents who call to explain to you that they are positive, that the children are positive or if they have contact with positive parents. At 11 a.m., a daddy said to me: “I am going to pick up my child because his mother is positive.” And there, you cross your fingers that the child’s test is negative because, otherwise, you will have a lot of work during the day, but lack of luck, it is positive. We had to close the class momentarily, call all the parents so that the children could go and be tested. We will start playing with the self-tests on D + 2 and D + 4. Yesterday evening, I learned that two other children in the class were positive and that, in the end, we might have done well to close this class for at least a day to realize that there were other positive cases and to avoid contamination.
Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer announced the new health protocol very late on Sunday afternoon, in a paid article in the Parisian. Did this have any consequences for your organization?
It was complicated because I learned about it at 6.30 p.m. on Sunday evening. I had started to prepare information for parents which was put in the liaison books, but you can imagine that for the class in question, it was already too late. We spend endless time explaining the new rules.
“I invented myself as a doctor by explaining that you have to be screened once, then on D + 2 and D + 4. It is very quickly very complicated.”
Catherine Da Silva, elementary school principalto franceinfo
And that was only the first day.
What state of mind are the teachers in your school like?
My colleagues are already very, very tired. They were already tired when they got home because they knew that it was going to start to destabilize their teaching, since you have children who leave or, as we are going to have today, children who arrive in small quantities depending on availability. pharmacists to be able to do the tests and present them to me at the entrance. I have spent my life managing this health crisis since September, making lists of children who return on such and such a day, then on such and such a day, finally there is no longer a contact case, there is a positive case therefore, it will be such and such a day. It’s very complicated when you have a supervising minister who explains that everything is going well, that there is a form of denial of reality and that he does not realize that in the field things are not going so well that that, that it is not that easy.
What health measures would you like to see implemented at school?
CO2 sensors, FFP2 masks for teachers. I am in Saint-Denis. The town hall has chosen to buy CO2 sensors, except that we have one per establishment. It needs 12 hours of charge and it has four hours of battery life, so I can only do polls. In addition, we have a construction site just in front of the school so the windows are open, the teaching is degraded, not to mention the masks. For little ones, concentration, listening to the teacher, it becomes very complicated.
“When we are told that we must enforce barrier gestures, I challenge anyone to put a mask on a child’s head for three hours in a row without putting it under the nose.”
Catherine Da Silva, elementary school principalto franceinfo
Jean-Michel Blanquer has chosen to keep the schools open and we all agree on that. No worries. Perhaps we had to give ourselves the means to do it without everyone falling ill, without the teaching being prevented because I am not just a daycare center, I would also like to be able to teach things to the students. and not be in a system of dysfunctions valid for several days, all the time.