Coronavirus: the school is preparing to go into blackout mode

Even when the shells rained on the Somme in 1917, there was class at the village school. The complete closure of all structures welcoming young people, from the crèche to the university, announced this Thursday by the Head of State, is a historic decision. "The central government has never taken such a measure for all schools," confirms education historian Claude Lelièvre.

After Italy, Greece, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Ireland, France in turn is preparing to live from Monday, and "until further notice" without school structure. Objective: "continue to save time" in the race against the clock against the Covid 19.

Discreet vectors of the disease, since they can transmit it without necessarily suffering from it, the little ones are therefore asked to stay at home, and with them at least one of their parents. Exception to the rule: the children of health personnel, on the front line in the crisis, will benefit from a minimum daycare service.

"This will make life very difficult for everyone, but we have no other choice, we have to protect people," agrees Hubert Salaün, spokesperson for the federation of parents of Peep students ... and resident of the Oise, itself bound to the school-less diet for almost a week. "We didn't think it was going to become generalized so quickly, but here, we saw that the distance education system works rather well," he appreciates.

Célia (the first name has been changed), on the contrary, heard with "relief" but also a dose of "disappointment" the announcement of Emmanuel Macron. Disappointment, "because we should perhaps have made this decision earlier, at least locally in places where there was already a known case," reacts this mother, who on Tuesday ordered the order to her son of 16 years of skipping classes, since a case of Covid-19 was diagnosed on a teacher at his Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire high school, in Etampes (Essonne).

A day to organize everything

In recent days, in this high school as in other establishments, the little music of panic had started to grow, including in establishments hitherto spared the virus. Christine (the first name has been changed), director of a kindergarten in the Paris suburbs, has seen absenteeism gallop among her young students in recent days, without parents clearly explaining why their child stayed at home. "Some people tell me that he is tired, or not very well ... But I can see that the absences are abnormally high," she said on Thursday. I miss the equivalent of a class and a half, out of six, since the parents learned that a municipal officer lives in the Oise and therefore stays at home as a precaution. "

"We had classes these past few days with many absent, cases of students and sick staff everywhere, and a lot of contradictory injunctions ... Now things are clarified", welcomes Valérie Sipahimalani, SVT teacher in a Parisian high school, unionized at Snes. From this Friday, the last day of class before the big school shutdown, she will “give work tracks” to her students, and “heat the photocopier” to distribute a maximum of documents, “because not everyone will have not have access to a good internet connection, she presumes. We will manage by sending emails, and also with the textbooks that the students have at home. "

Blanquer promises solutions for each student

My home school, the free online class platform developed by Cned, already active in Oise, Haut-Rhin, Morbihan and Corsica, will also be generalized. It has been calibrated to withstand the shock of 6 million simultaneous connections. "We will continue to work," says the Minister of National Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, who believes that distance education should probably remain the rule until the spring break, at a minimum.

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For those who do not have the necessary equipment - "about 5%" of the 12 million students - "we will offer solutions to everyone, in conjunction with local communities," promises the minister, adding that "preparation has occurred ”from this unprecedented situation. This was not, until Thursday noon, absolutely not on the agenda rue de Grenelle.

"We have had strong pressure in recent days to build mailing lists of the parents of our students, but no access to the online course platform," said Marie-Hélène Plard, spokesperson for the teachers' union (Snuipp FSU) in Seine-Saint-Denis. "The reality is that we will discover everything and we will do what we know how to do," continues the teacher. Give work, indications of activities, revisions to the students, but we will be far from a real continuity of the courses as if the school were open. A reality expressed in recent days among the 300,000 or so students from clusters and departments already affected by the closings.

"The key word now is going to be solidarity and kindness," hopes Rodrigo Arenas, the spokesperson for the FCPE parents' federation. A benevolence, he anticipates, "which will also have to be exercised on exams and especially the bac", in this school year turned upside down like never before.