Schools and institutes resumed their classes on Monday with the absence of 145 teachers on sick leave due to covid, however headmasters had feared a much greater problem due to the ravages of the covid following the Christmas break.
Rosa Pinto, Headmistress at the El Palmeral school said, “We were quite fearful of the situation because we did not know how many would be absent, but having just one or two missing is a great relief”.
The observation made by Pinto seems to be about average across the province with most schools and colleges saying adding that they neither observed significant absences among the students.
There were absences of just “One or two children per classroom, depending on the groups, with the rest attending normally,” they confirm.
They believe that the situation cannot be considered “excessively problematic ” because teacher losses would be around 0.6% according to the figures approved by Education, far from the 10% to 20% that the representatives of Headteachers feared before the schools were opened this Monday morning.
On December 22, the final day of class before the Christmas holiday, Covid dropouts only accounted for 0.5% of the more than 78,000 female and male teachers in municipal educational centres. That volume of casualties is half of what it was a year before, on December 22, 2020.
Education points out that, unlike January 2021, “teachers are now immunised and, therefore, with more substitute teachers than the previous year, and with staff who have been vaccinated, tensions due to teacher losses due to Covid are not expected to be any higher than those of January 2021”.
