With the resumption of the school in almost all of Italy (the return to the desks will end on 20 September with the return to class of students in Puglia and Calabria), there have been cases of Covid infections both among students and among teachers. Situations that are already causing quarantines, inconvenience and new distance learning. From South Tyrol to Campania, the numbers are still limited.
Pacific (Anief): quarantine cases are spreading like wildfire
And if Mario Rusconi, president of the National Association of Headmasters of Rome, explains that “at the moment throughout Italy there are a few hundred classes in quarantine out of a total of 400 thousand. In Rome a few dozen “, the president of the union Anief Marcello Pacifico raises the alarm:” The cases of quarantined classes are spreading like wildfire – he says -: a phenomenon that took shape in the very first days of school before in Bolzano , to then find fertile ground also in Lombardy, Emilia Romagna, Sardinia and Lazio. Lessons have been resumed for a week and there are already about a hundred classes forced to stay at home, so to go back to that dad that the school governors said we had put behind us », adds Pacifico.
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Minister Bianchi assures us: we are talking about limited numbers
The Minister of Education Patrizio Bianchi, for his part, throws water on the fire of controversy. «They are specific situations, there are not dozens of them, we are controlling them – he underlines -. We wrote it in the decree of August 6 that where there were contagion situations we would be able to control them and so we are doing. We are talking about limited numbers compared to the total which, with great joy, has restarted ».
The perplexities of school leaders on the management of positives
There is also malaise among school managers for some changes in the management of cases in which a positivity emerges. “The management of quarantines has changed but we principals have not been informed – reports Cristina Costarelli, president of the National Association of Principals of Rome and director of the Newton high school in the capital – from tomorrow (September 17, ed) we will have two quarantined classes in my school and so I discovered that while last year the management of quarantines was in charge of the ASL now it passes to the general practitioners: all this has not been anticipated by any circular, we managers have not been informed of this new measure. Schools remain unaware of important aspects that they need to know: with this novelty we could have returns in dribs and drabs ». The same diversified quarantine – 7 days for the vaccinated, 10 for the unvaccinated – creates inconvenience to schools, Costarelli points out “and in the end for each quarantine two weeks of school activity are lost, because certainly the teacher cannot go on with the plan if you have few kids in the class. “
The procedure to follow in case of infections
The Memorandum of Understanding for the 2021-2022 school year signed last August 14 by the Ministry of Education and some trade unions highlighted that, according to the minutes of the Cts 34/2021, “in the event of indicative symptoms acute respiratory tract infection of staff or students, the specific procedure must be activated immediately: the person concerned must be invited to reach his home and the reporting and contact tracing procedure must be activated by the competent ASL “. Each worker is required to promptly inform the head teacher or his / her delegate of any close contacts with positive people, of the presence of any flu symptoms during the performance of their work or of the presence of symptoms in students present within the institution. .