State needs to stop taking schools for granted

The State needs to stop taking schools and the people who work in them for granted. At the time of writing, it is unclear whether the decision to vaccinate people according to age cohort rather than by whether they are in essential jobs will be reversed.

For many people in schools, this is the last straw. It is yet another decision taken without consultation. It seems to have taken even Minister for Education Norma Foley by surprise.

No teacher, special-needs assistant or principal wants to be vaccinated before the elderly and those with very high-risk medical or living conditions. The suspicion is, however, that vaccinating on an age basis is happening because it is easier, not because it is fairer.

Take a young primary special-needs assistant working with unmasked pupils and who has a vulnerable parent or child living with her. Fairness would dictate that this young person should be vaccinated ahead of a 55-year-old person living alone and working from home, whose weekly shop constitutes the extent of his or her exposure. The same criteria apply to gardaí, retail and transport workers, as well as others in essential, public-facing jobs.

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The infuriating, disrespectful practice of bombing schools on Friday afternoons with demands affecting both students and teachers has continued

As for schools being safe places, last week more than one in five cases of Covid-19 (22 per cent) were detected among school-aged children aged between four and 18.

The next-highest figure concerned those aged 25-24, at 16 per cent. In contrast, cases among those aged 65-74 and 75-84 years old were 3.7 and 2.3 per cent respectively. It is usually a far more devastating disease among the elderly but lots of younger people live with elderly or vulnerable relatives they are terrified of infecting.

Overcrowded classrooms

The immediate response to school outbreaks is to declare that it is not clear that they began in school. Instead, it is attributed to play dates and gatherings at school gates. Occam’s razor suggests that play dates and gatherings are not as simple an explanation as overcrowded classrooms.

We have never had acceptable levels of contact tracing. Nor can you adequately track what you are unwilling to acknowledge might exist. One public-health definition of a close contact is any person who has been between one and two metres from a confirmed case for more than 15 minutes in a school day, with consideration of other mitigation measures such as face coverings, pods, ventilation and so on.

Teachers seem to be regarded as education partners only in the sense of being relied upon to save politicians from angry parents who want the schools open

The devil is in the detail. Teachers wearing masks of any kind, teaching pupils wearing masks of any kind, in classrooms that are deemed to be adequately ventilated spaces, are rarely found to be close contacts. That is what “consideration of other mitigation measures” means in reality.

Teachers have worked for 40 minutes a day for five days with a student sitting in the front row who then tested positive for Covid-19, but those teachers were not deemed close contacts by the Health Service Executive because they wore a mask and were in an allegedly well-ventilated classroom. We do not know how well ventilated because the Government considered that relatively inexpensive monitors which measure CO2 (a good proxy for ventilation) were an unnecessary expense.

Reneging on vaccination promises is not the first slap in the face. As Fintan O'Toole commented, schools were not reopened after the first lockdown by good planning or meticulous preparation but by hoping that "principals and teachers would juggle everything and not drop too many balls. Miraculously, they pulled it off."

The reward has been to be expected to pull off more and more miraculous feats.

For example, having made no provision whatsoever to hold Leaving Certificate oral examinations, the Department of Education gambled on teachers being unwilling to let their students down. The responsibility for running the orals was passed to schools.

Microphones were supposed to be sourced, training in online audio recording provided and rosters organised in a week. With Covid-19 figures plateauing at stubbornly high levels, masks could not be worn by either students or teachers.

It took five days of lobbying by teachers’ unions before it was finally accepted that asking teachers and students to work without masks was outrageous.

Demands

The infuriating, disrespectful practice of bombing schools on Friday afternoons with demands affecting both students and teachers has continued. For example, instructions concerning students who might have changed their minds about sitting the Leaving Cert and now want to sit orals came out on a Friday afternoon after some schools had actually commenced orals.

Teachers seem to be regarded as education partners only in the sense of being relied upon to save politicians from angry parents who want the schools open and to stay open.

Teachers can be relied on because they acknowledge not just the privilege of being able to work in a global pandemic but also the double privilege of working with young people at a vital stage in their lives.

The State should just admit that we are willing to tolerate keeping schools open not because they are the safest places but because they are essential to the functioning of society. If they are essential to the functioning of society, could we please treat those who keep them open a bit better?