Parents are shaking their heads in confusion amid COVID-19 chaos, as some 2.4 million masked students rush off to the opening day of school eager to see friends and return to a semblance of normal routine.
Oh, for those days when all one worried about were their clothes, books and teachers.
The schools “have not really been organized,” said Andrea Tovim of Petah Tikva, who has five children ranging in age from two to six. “Some of the places did not even send out a WhatsApp or email until yesterday.”
When Tovim learned that all children over the age of three were being asked to take a rapid home coronavirus antigen test on Tuesday, she started calling friends all over the city, unsure of where to get the test and how to administer it.
What she found was that “no one knew anything.”
One parent told The Jerusalem Post she thought if kids were vaccinated, they did not need to be tested. Others said their schools had run out of kits, and still others decided they would just forgo the screening. After all, testing is not mandatory.
For most parents, it was still unclear how the results would be checked on Wednesday. A Jerusalem mother said she had saved the negative test sticks in plastic baggies and photographed them – just in case.
“It’s amazing they are trusting parents to tell the truth since this whole new wave started when parents came back from abroad and skipped quarantine by sending their kids to school and infecting many other kids,” Steven Scheer of Modi’in wrote on Facebook.
“Not everyone is going to take the test,” Tovim said. “Parents did not receive the messages on time, or they could not get to their schools in the hours they wanted them to do so to get the kits. Of course, that means children are going to come while infected.”
“If they are disorganized, how are we supposed to be?” she asked.
The schools are taking their cues from the Education Ministry, which only on Tuesday released its “national plan for the opening of the school year in a full, comprehensive and detailed manner” – one day before school was to begin.
In the 12-page document, the ministry outlined how the school year will be conducted, hoping that busy parents shopping for last-minute school books and supplies would have a chance to read it.
While schools in green, yellow and orange cities will “conduct their full daily itinerary according to their given weekly schedule,” some schools located in red cities have a different outline.
For fifth- through seventh-graders, “studies will continue while taking action to reduce contact.” What that means is still unclear since schools can decide for themselves on any combination of distance learning, studying in open spaces or “any other format.”
High schoolers in red cities and in classrooms with fewer than 70% of students vaccinated will revert to at-home learning.
How will parents know what percentage of their child’s classroom is vaccinated? Well, the schools have to tell them. But many of them don’t even know yet because they were reliant on parent surveys, a high percentage of which were yet unanswered.
Moreover, 70% is being calculated not just by actual vaccination; the calculation includes students who have tested positive in the serological tests or who recovered from the virus.
At the same time, throughout the month of September, students who have received the first dose of the vaccine will also be included in the required 70%, but they will not be exempt from quarantine in the case of coming in contact with an infected individual.
Jerusalem, for example, is divided into districts. Some schools are in red zones, and others are not.
Nitza Raymond was still searching for this list to determine in what color zone her children’s school was located when she spoke to the Post on Tuesday. The Health Ministry said the municipality had the list, but the municipality said the Education Ministry had it, which turned out to be the case.
The zones and quarantines actually mean 2.4 million students will not really be in their classrooms: 94,000 students are infected or in isolation, and another 150,000 are in red zones with not enough vaccinated children, meaning they are learning on Zoom or in open spaces – the latter being a last-minute allowance by the Education and Health ministries.
Many parents still don’t know if their children tested positive or negative for antibodies, despite waiting in line for up to three hours last week to get their fingers pricked. The results went missing.
One Jerusalem father told the Post he called his health fund after waiting two days for a WhatsApp message from the Health Ministry, which told him they did not have access to the results.
On Monday, Chavie Machefsky Fuchs of Tzur Yitzhak took her daughter to school orientation and found out that a child in the other group had COVID-19, and the whole class went into isolation. Her daughter was not exposed, but it literally overwhelmed her.
“It is this constant fear that at any second everything is going to stop and then just not being sure how to even start,” she said.
Fuchs, who has four children in grades one through eight, said the previous year “became so overwhelming at a certain point,” just trying to stay on top of the Zooms and assignments, that she is looking forward to going back to routine. But she does not have high expectations that the euphoria will last.
Fuchs recalled how when schools opened last year within the capsule system, kids were transported from her settlement to Kfar Saba in one big group on packed buses with no differentiation between their schools or neighborhoods.
“I kind of lost faith,” she said. “Poor decisions are being made by people not on the ground and never on the ground.”
Fuchs nervously laughed talking about her daughter’s first-grade kick-off celebration. Over the summer, the school would not commit to whether such a ceremony could take place. On Monday, the school finally announced that it was canceled, only to retract its decision the next day after parents complained. Now, it is expected that the celebration will occur, but with limited numbers of parents.
“All of this could have been worked out at the beginning of the summer,” she said. “No one thought coronavirus was going to be gone in September.”
The last year and a half should have been used not only to prepare for the 2021-2022 school year, but to repair some of the previous and existing challenges of the system, such as large class sizes or not properly using outdoor spaces, Fuchs said.
“Instead, they just keep sticking on Band-Aids,” she said.
But for other parents, just going back to school is enough to make them happy.
“I cannot wait for him to go to school; I cannot wait for him to stay in school,” Tamar Krongrad of Ramat Aviv said of her teenage son. “Kids just lost too much” last year. “They cannot do it anymore.”
Ilana Hiller of Beit Shemesh, a mother of four children between the ages of six and 15, agreed. “We want them to have a normal experience each day, hanging out with friends,” she said.
Hiller said she believes the teachers and administrators are doing the best they can with the knowledge they have and was “very pleased” overall.
“I feel like my anxiety levels have increased over the past year, and I think a lot of it is dealing with the unknown,” Hiller said. “It really helps me not to get too caught up in all the fine details and instead just try to do what is best for my family.”
Tovim said she knows of many families who are choosing not to send their children to school until October 1 because there are only a handful of school days, due to the High Holy Days and Sukkot, and they don’t want to risk spending Rosh Hashanah or Sukkot in isolation.
For her, quarantine wouldn’t matter too much, she said.
“My mother-in-law won’t come because she is afraid to be around the kids when they start school,” Tovim said with a laugh.
There are parents, however, who are pretty angry and afraid.
Raymond, whose three daughters are going into grades seven, eight and 12, called the decision to open school on September 1 “reckless” and “idiotic.”
After the country saw a spike in cases in the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community as a result of schools opening in August, starting school now is asking for mass infection, she said.
The High Holy Days and Sukkot are a time when families get together, and infected children are at risk of spreading the virus to their parents and grandparents, Raymond said.
“The government is worried about their pockets, not people’s health,” she said, adding: “I am sending my kids to school, but I am very afraid. It is a game of Russian roulette.”