The number of isolated students is skyrocketing, and as reported in "Israel Today", a situation of actual closure has also been created in the education system.
This dismal situation is expected to peak this week as the education system enters a critical week, and in the coming days the number of sick students and the number of students in isolation is expected to rise even further.
Thus, morbidity data yesterday showed more than 40,000 verified in the entire education system, of which about 35,076 students and another 5,610 educators.
The number of students in isolation is also rising, and according to the official figure stands at 75,547 students.
However, the true number is much higher, for several reasons: First, in the new test outline not everyone is first tested for an institutional antigen test, and some stay at home based on a home antigen test.
Second, not all school principals transmit data to the Ministry of Education's command and control center, and it suffers from under-reporting of student and classroom isolation.
Education Minister Yifat Shasha Bitton: "We will do everything to ensure that students study maximum days physically in a school with a minimum of isolations" // Photo: Yaniv Zohar
In addition, in some cities siblings of students who have been exposed to a verified patient are not allowed to come to educational institutions (although they themselves have not met a verified patient), so the Ministry of Education faces tremendous ambiguity regarding the extent of morbidity in the education system.
More than 30 closed schools were reported yesterday, and the number of closed kindergartens is unknown.
The most disturbing statistic is the number of new patients in the education system, which continues to rise.
At the end of the week, 6,728 new patients were discovered in the education system (constituting about 40 percent of all patients), of whom 5,871 are new sick students.
The implications for the education system in kindergartens and elementary schools are critical, as each such patient puts dozens of students in isolation.
For example, if half of the sick students, about 3,000, are kindergarten or elementary students - each of them can potentially put 10 to 10 students out of isolation who are not isolated, that is, vaccinated or recovering.
It should be noted that the proportion of students exempted from isolation in kindergartens stands at only 20 percent (106,000 out of 540,000), and the rate of students exempted from isolation in primary schools, grades 1-6, stands at only 34 percent (350,000 out of a million students).
Distance learning (illustration), Photo: Liron Moldovan
The new isolation outline, which sends any student who is not vaccinated to isolation without any way to break free from it (as was the case in the green classroom), challenges the education system in kindergartens and elementary schools to remain open.
In practice, if there is no change in the data graph, a situation of actual closure may occur for hundreds of thousands of students.
"The schools may be open and active, but in practice there are no studies. The students stay at home, cancel tests and classes, and there is also no distance learning," said Shai Odser, a father of four students in the education system from Bat Yam and chairman of the school's parent leadership. Our son, a fourth-grader, had to go into additional solitary confinement, after he had already been in solitary confinement.
He said, "On Saturday night two weeks ago we were notified to go into solitary confinement, and in the middle of the week we went back to school as part of the green class outline.
Odser says that "what is happening now in the schools is not education. Only the vaccinated and recovering students come there, and that is very little. My son was also vaccinated but not enough time has passed since then so he is not considered vaccinated, and out of 33 students in the class only 14 come. Needless to say "There is no zoom, no distance learning and the gaps that have been talked about for a year and a half will only get worse."
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