One of the rituals caused by the pandemic is that the teachers’ associations warn at the beginning of the school year about what could make everyday life difficult for children and young people again: school closures, class cancellations or many infections among students and teachers because, for example, elementary schools are not required to wear masks can. Added to this is the huge unsolved problem of the teacher shortage. Even if the countries deny that they poach teachers from each other, this is only due to the different conditions. The German Teachers’ Association estimates that 40,000 teachers are missing. In North Rhine-Westphalia, 4,400 posts are vacant immediately after the start of the new school year.
Heike Schmoll
Political correspondent in Berlin, responsible for “Bildungswelten”.
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The high risk of infection in the classrooms not only worries school principals and teachers, but also parents. It is all the more astonishing that an opportunity to reduce the aerosol content in the air in classrooms has hardly been used. According to the Federal Ministry of Economics, the federal states have only used 22 percent of the federal funds for mobile air filters. That is almost 43.2 million euros of the available funds of 200 million euros. Since the program expired on July 31 of this year, this is a final balance sheet.