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Learning under precarious conditions: a normal German school toilet in 2020
Photo: Michelle Shinners / Getty Images
Everyone knows this smell in school toilets, you don't have to describe it.
It has been the same for decades, regardless of the year of construction of the building.
Little seems to have changed about this, not even in times of Corona.
Because every third child in Germany is currently shy of going to the school toilet: Around 36 percent of the parents questioned stated in a Forsa survey from which the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung" quotes that their child does not like going to the school toilet because of poor hygiene.
Fathers and mothers from Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate report problems more frequently than parents from Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.
Only a quarter of parents certify that their child's school is "very clean".
Almost two-thirds of parents (61 percent) said schools should be cleaned more thoroughly and more frequently.
The survey also shows that every fourth mother and every fifth father are “somewhat” or “very” worried that their child could become infected with corona due to poor hygiene at school.
"In the course of the corona crisis everyone is talking about the new relevance of hygiene and cleanliness," said Thomas Dietrich, the federal master of the building cleaning trade.
"But where it is really important - with children and school - there is a sobering gap between aspiration and reality."
After the first lockdown, an additional layer of plaster - then came the bill
In view of the corona pandemic, many schools have been equipped with soap dispensers and hand disinfectants, and in some places an additional layer of plaster has been introduced - "but that was after the first lockdown," says cleaning company Holger Eickholz of the newspaper.
After that, the municipalities would have seen the higher bills.
"You're trying to turn it down a bit now, so it was a flash in the pan," said Eickholz.
For the representative survey on behalf of the Federal Guild Association of the Building Cleaning Trade, Forsa employees interviewed 1,025 people who have school-age children in October and November.
The questions were previously agreed with the »FAS«.
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yes / AFP