There are two weeks left to go before Spain’s schools fully reopen after the coronavirus crisis forced their closure back in March, and the only thing that people in the Madrid region know is that no one knows anything.
A total of 1.5 million school students in the region are preparing their school bags with no idea as to whether they will actually get back in the classroom.
The Popular-Party-run government, which is in charge of the regional education system, has admitted that even at this late stage it is considering the four scenarios it announced at the end of June. The political opposition and the unions, meanwhile, have grown tired of asking questions and getting no replies.
Anger is also growing among the sector of society that will be most affected by how the new school year begins: teachers, school principals and parents, who still have no idea how they will have to organize their daily lives from September onward.
Meanwhile, Fernando Simón, the director of the Health Ministry’s Coordination Center for Health Alerts and the visible face of the Spanish government during the ongoing coronavirus crisis, voiced a message of warning to citizens on Thursday given the constant increase in new cases and deaths that Spain has been seeing in recent weeks. “No one should have any doubts,” he said. “Things are not going well.” The ministry last night reported 7,039 new infections, 3,349 of them in the last 24 hours.
The Health Ministry admitted that while the increase in detected cases has brought the country to a situation where “the epidemic is not out of control on a national level,” it is in some specific areas of the country.
El Pais
