Barely two weeks after the start of the school year, the situation is becoming unmanageable in many schools. The omicron variant hits students and teachers, leading to serial absences and class closures.
A new meeting will take place this afternoon between Caroline Désir, the Minister of Compulsory Education, and a dozen directors of all the basic education networks.
The Covid will not be the only point on the table. The list of demands is heavy. A strike is announced for Thursday, February 10. Not only because of the pandemic, but also because many files are dragging on.
“In my school, since the start of the school year on January 10, we have seen an increase in Covid cases, both among teachers and among students and educators. And since Sunday, we went very quickly from 2% of cases to 10% of cases yesterday among our students, and the same among teachers. I would even say that it is double for teachers. I lack 22% of supervisory staff“, laments Anne Simon, director of the Sainte-Marie College, in Mouscron.
Principals therefore want more administrative help. Anne Simon proposes this idea “d’a call center for directors, so that they feel less alone, because we’ve finally been managing for two years, but at times, we are still very alone when faced with certain decisions to be made“.
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“The objective of this meeting is obviously to talk a little about the news, but it is to try to go beyond it. The news has highlighted a series of difficulties which are structural, completes Dominique Verlinden, director of the municipal school of Uccle Center questioned this Thursday morning on La Première. Our fight today is to make it understood that basic education, through its school principals in particular, is the poor relation of our education system. Today, we need to be given the means to act so that we can be quality players, particularly in the context of this reform of the Pact for teaching excellence.“
Dominique Verlinden : “Our demands relate first to a revision of the status of the school director, an almost symbolic revision of our status, but also of the framework we have. […] It’s not administrative help that we need, but it’s really a structural and organic administrative framework, with executive secretaries who are able to take on some of the expenses that constitute constraints for us. and which take us away from our educational missions.“