The impact of the Covid virus on staff and pupils at the Delacroix secondary school in Drancy in the north-east suburbs of Paris over the past year has been unrelenting. “Twenty pupils at the secondary school have lost relatives: fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts,” says Aline Cottereau, a modern languages teacher at the school. Now, however, the situation is getting even worse. “We've always had positive cases inside the establishment. But after the return from the winter holidays [editor's note, which ended on March 1st in the Paris region] the situation has been exponential,” she says.
In an open letter sent on Thursday March 25th to President Emmanuel Macron and education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, concerned staff at the school pointed to the catastrophic impact of the epidemic on their establishment since the end of the holidays. This includes two positive cases among the school management, around twenty cases among teachers and a further 54 among pupils, with more detected every day.
“Maths colleagues have calculated the incidence rate at the school,” says Aline Cottereau. This works out at 1,200 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, which is almost double the rate suffered by the local Seine-Saint-Denis département or county, which at 736 cases per 100,000 is already the highest in France. Applied just to the school staff, the rate is equivalent to 7,500 cases per 100,000. The modern languages teacher cannot hide her anger. “It's intolerable, wounding, unbelievable to hear our minister say, in the media, that you don't get infected in schools, that all's going well. Here in Seine-Saint-Denis people have been suffering from Covid for a year,” says Aline Cottereau.
Mediapart has spoken to many people involved in the education system across France and the picture is the same everywhere: one of mounting concern. “It reflects the worsening health situation in the country and particularly the acceleration in this deterioration,” says Sophie Vénétitay, deputy secretary general of the SNES-FSU teaching union. “We've noticed it for around at least ten days and especially in the départements that have been locked down [editor's note, 19 départements have recently been locked down] where the situation gets worse day by day. And more so in the middle schools,” she adds.
The official view, stated once again by Jean-Michel Blanquer on March 21st , is that “you get infected less in the schools than the rest of society”. For the education minister, confronting the “risk” of Covid seems “small in comparison with the importance of keeping children in education”. Yet the case figures reported by his own ministry clearly contradict his argument.
The latest update from the national education authorities on Friday March 26th shows an exponential rise in the number of cases, among both teachers and pupils. The closure of classes or entire schools is following the same pattern. The school Covid cases are, naturally enough, concentrated in the regions that are the most affected overall: the Paris region and the Hauts-de-France region of northern France. But an increase can be seen everywhere, particularly in the Grand Est, in Occitanie in the south, in Brittany to the west and the Pays-de-la-Loire in the centre west of the country.
Even these figures are an underestimate. When the Ministry of Education cites 21,183 positive cases among pupils during one week this refers just to the cases declared by parents. The public health body Santé Publique France (SPF), which counts all the positive tests from laboratories, gives a figure of 45,844 cases among the age group 0 to 19 in the same week. That marks an increase of 26% over the previous seven days.
“Something's going to break,” predicts Guislaine David, secretary general of the SNUipp-FSU, the main trade union for primary school teachers. “Cases are increasing in number, including among teachers. In many cases we can no longer respect the [Covid health] protocol.” Her union is calling on primary school teachers to take strike action from Monday March 29th.
Five classes have closed at the Delacroix school in Drancy but despite that the school has stayed open. Staff there are now “fighting” to get a “urgent and temporary closure of the establishment with a complete switch to distance learning”, they say in their letter to the president.
“The [Covid health] protocol no longer serves any purpose, it's hypocrisy, a load of rubbish peddled by our minister,” says teacher Aline Cottereau. “We're not doctors but we are sure of this: that we can no longer stem the epidemic any other way than by closing.” Since Tuesday March 23rd the teachers asserted their right to withdraw their labour but were told this was unjustified because “according to our management there is no serious and imminent danger. We didn't expect anything else : they can't contradict their minister.” Under French employment law employees have the right to withdraw their labour and stop work if there is a “serious and imminent danger to their life or health”.
At the Politizer middle school in nearby La Courneuve the staff have also given notice of their right to stop work, but this has been opposed in their case too. Classic teacher Mina El Azzouz describes the “violence” of the situation there, and the “mistrust of the Ministry of Education personnel”. She says that on Thursday March 25th the school was overcome with “emotion and exhaustion” when a teacher was taken to hospital suffering from Covid. “And one of our colleagues with co-morbidities, who we knew was vulnerable but continued to come to work, has also been affected. Our principal and their deputy have also tested positive,” she says.
“We're seeing things getting worse, time is going by and yet nothing happens,” says Mina El Azzouz. “We've had [Covid] cases among teachers every week, more and more of them. But we don't have any additional resources: there aren't enough maintenance staff, we don't have a school nurse, the classes are overcrowded. None of our warnings since September have had any effect,” she adds.
On Thursday March 25th pupils and staff stayed in the school yard while in one corner teachers held a general assembly. A total of 37 staff voted for the school to close for a week, with five votes against and two abstentions. The following day staff repeated their request to stop work, putting them on collision course with management.
'One colleague who's only just returned to work will be managing the school on their own on Monday'
In a nursery school at a small town in the Val d'Oise département north of Paris the English variant of Covid continues to take its toll. On March 5th two little girls, sisters, were declared positive and this was reported to the school's headteacher. Three days later the two classes that had been in contact with those girls were put into isolation. That meant 60 pupils out of a total of 140 in the nursery school were off school.
At the time, the girls' teachers were not considered to be 'contacts' because they were wearing masks when dealing with the children, who themselves are exempt from wearing them. In the following days, however, the teachers also tested positive. The virus did the rounds and by Thursday March 11th the school was emptied of staff and closed as everyone went into isolation.
Yet by the following Monday, March 15th, the pupils started to return. “Often they were ill and coughing and sneezing,” said 'Laure' – not her real name, the only teacher who had escaped the virus at the time. “We're a nursery school and the children don't wear masks.” The result was that other pupils started to contract the virus and the vicious cycle continued.
“We had fear in our hearts every day,” says Laure. “You asked yourself 'When am I going to catch it? Which parent is lying to us? Which parents isn't telling us that their child is sick?' But we continued to operate, using up all our energy.”
And then suddenly it became too much. “There comes a time when you just become totally exhausted,” says Laure. For this dedicated teacher that moment came on Friday March 19th. “We learnt about a new case. It was at that point I said 'stop!'” On Monday March 22nd her doctor signed her off work for ten days, until April 1st. “I was suffering from anxiety. I could no longer bear the psychological pressure, the fear. I wasn't even sleeping any more,” she says.
Speaking from her home in the suburbs of Paris, Laure thinks first of all about her colleagues. “My headteacher was declared Covid positive, she has quite bad symptoms,” she says. “Another of my colleagues who caught the virus lost eight kilos in a week. The one who's only just got back to work will be managing the school on her own on Monday.”
At Saint-Denis in the the north Paris suburbs Stéphanie Fouilhoux, the head of a nursery school and a representative of the SNUipp–FSU teaching union, describes the situation among the six teachers at her school. “One has been off sick for three weeks and two tested positive for Covid last week. But the school was kept open,” she says. “We didn't have any supply teachers so we just had to manage by dividing the pupils between the classes, mixing them up. We can't follow the protocol any more. In the end, on Tuesday evening, the three staff who were still unaffected, including me, were declared to be [case] contacts. But the school stayed open: the education authority found two replacements on Thursday and Friday, doubtless taken from other schools. There was no forward planning, it's being made up as they go along.”
Sophie Vénétitay, of the SNES-FSU union, also questions the government's strategy. “The Ministry of Education has this very annoying tendency to restrict the debate to a binary choice: either you open everything or you close everything,” she says. “When you ask for additional measures, you get accused of wanting to shut down schools. For months now they've left no room for debate. There's a permanent discrepancy between the message which insists that all's going well because the minister runs things very well, and the reality.”
Faced with the growing number of cases, and with a shortage of staff, the Ministry of Education is using school supervisors – whose usual role is to help maintain good behaviour in the establishment - to take lessons (see Mediapart's article here). “We've been asking for months now for extra staff, to reduce class sizes,” says Guislaine David.
In Paris it is the city council's own services who are carrying out Covid tracing in schools. “It's shooting up,” confirms Anne Souyris, the assistant mayor in charge of health issues under Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo. “Everything has doubled in one week: 438 primary schools out of 650 were affected, that's two thirds of them. In the school canteens more and more staff have been affected. To replace the absent teachers this week they hired 20 supply teachers on contract, for 5,600 classes. Great! I am astonished that they haven't hired teachers for a year.”
The only progress made in fighting against the virus in primary schools has been the use of saliva tests. Between March 15th and March 22nd some 320,000 of these tests were offered to parents and 200,000 were used. The positivity rate was 0.49%, a incidence level of close to 500 cases per 100,000 pupils. This is higher than the overall national average which is 325 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. But the two figures are not in fact comparable because all pupils at school are tested, whereas the testing at national level simply involves people with symptoms or case contacts.
The problem with these tests in fact resides in another issue. “They're not being carried out where they are needed. Middle schools that ask for them because they have clusters don't get them,” says Guislaine David from the SNUipp-FSU union. The figures from local educational authorities show that there have been as many saliva tests in areas that have been little affected by the epidemic, such as Bordeaux, as have been carried out in those areas that are at the centre of the epidemic, such as around Créteil, south-east of the capital.
Back in Paris, Anne Souyris says: “This testing was looked on as routine epidemiological screening. Some lists of schools to test were drawn up several weeks ago. But we're at the peak of an epidemic, in the middle of a crisis! There should be lots more tests and clusters should be targeted.”
“The virus is gong to win, we're going to close the schools because there will be no more teachers,” predicts Anne Souyris. Guislaine David says: “We're already facing disaster. There are urgent measures that need to be taken, to make pupils, their families and staff safe. But the government is in total denial”.
On the evening of Friday March 26th the government reacted to the worsening situation with the education minister announcing yet another tightening of the Covid protocols within schools. “In the départements which are locked down each proven case will lead to the closure of that class. From nursery schools to the final year at secondary school,” said Jean-Michel Blanquer. As a result more classes will switch to distance learning.
But this new approach brings problems of its own. “The teachers have received no training in remote teaching,” explains Marie-Hélène Plard, a representatives of the SNUipp-FSU union in the Hauts-de-Seine département in the Paris region. “A closure would be an enormous admission of failure, because nothing has been planned or anticipated for a year. The only difference is that the staff have developed their own expertise.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter