“The park has reopened! “, announces, amazed, a little boy to his classmates, just out of a primary school in central Buenos Aires. The children scream with joy and rush towards the square. On basketball courts and playgrounds, their uniforms, traditional white coats from Argentinian public schools, mingle with those, blue and red, from a local private school.
After eleven months of school closures, and in a context of a slight decrease in the curve of new cases of Covid-19 in Argentina (where the epidemic has killed more than 51,900), some 370,000 schoolchildren in the capital have resumed gradually the way to school since February 17th. They are expected to be joined in March by the rest of the country’s students, except those living with people at risk.
This back-to-school season under the southern summer sun is accompanied by a strict health protocol that the little Argentines qualify, at best, as “Weird”. “We can hardly touch anything, we have to stay away from each other and teachers”, Gaspar, 10, is surprised. Small groups, social distancing, ventilation of classrooms… The rules are numerous and sometimes confusing for the pupils. Decked out in small colorful masks, they nevertheless lend themselves to the game.
“Parents are another story”, worries the municipal employee responsible for supervising school outings. “In single file, 1 meter from each other please!” “, he throws at them. They do it sluggishly. “We are scolded”, Lorena Censi smiles. Mother of a 10-year-old boy, she welcomed the reopening of schools with relief: “It was hellish to keep working when he wasn’t going to school; I had to cook, constantly motivate him to do his homework… ”, tells this employee of an insurance company.
“Everything else has reopened before”
In this elementary school which had the particularity, before the pandemic, of making “Doble turno” (lessons in the morning and afternoon, unlike most schools which receive children for half a day), the duration of the lessons has been reduced to three hours per day to limit possible contagions. It’s already better than nothing for Chloe, 11, who says she is delighted to have found the benches – now individual – of the school: “I prefer to learn in class than on the computer; I feel that I forgot things in a year, and that my writing is less neat than before ”, she notes.
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