Opposition mounts to unsafe opening of schools in Spain
Opposition is mounting to the continued opening of unsafe schools in Spain. There are growing calls by educators and parents to close schools, and strikes have broken out among students as infection rates in education centres soar.
Coronavirus cases in schools have rapidly increased since children returned to classrooms after the holidays, with the number of outbreaks in education centres more than quadrupling in only two weeks. In the week ending January 22, the Ministry of Health reported 95 new outbreaks in a seven-day period; by February 5, this had risen to 413 individual outbreaks in schools in a single week, the highest figure since the government began recording this data. An “outbreak” is defined as a cluster of three or more linked cases in a single area.
In Spain, schools are resisting the coronavirus. Education Minister Isabel Celaá said on Wednesday that just 1.4% of classrooms are currently confined despite a nationwide surge in infections following increased socializing during the Christmas holidays.
Spanish schools were closed during the first wave of the pandemic last year, and reopened in September with safety measures in place such as the creation of bubble groups and mandatory facemasks depending on the age of students.
The Catalan regional government, which has carried out more than a million PCR tests since the beginning of the academic year on students and workers at elementary and secondary schools, estimates that one infected individual only passes on the virus to an average of 0.4 people within the school setting.
Demonstrations in November were conducted all over Spain against the ‘Ley Celaá.’ Photo courtesy of Mas Plurales.
When the Jesuits opened the Padre Piquer education center in Madrid 55 years ago, the neighborhood around it was viewed as a slum. Over the years the community’s infrastructure drastically improved, but the neighborhood remained a bubble of poverty in an otherwise affluent part of the Spanish capital. Throughout, the school remained true to its mission of bringing quality education to people of limited means. Now , Alberto Rodriguez de Rivera, the school’s director, is worried about how much longer that will last.