More than 800,000 students started classes in CABA and Mendoza

This Monday, the City of Buenos Aires and Mendoza were the first districts to start the 2022 school year, since the rest will do so on March 2, after the Carnival holidays.More than 800 thousand Buenos Aires and Mendoza students returned to classes, 80% of which with at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine.
Both districts aim with this provision to achieve 190 days of classes, ten more than what the Federal Education Law obliges to guarantee to all jurisdictions in the country. The head of the Buenos Aires Government, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, began the school year with the premise of “defending every minute of class”, in the middle of a package with extended days and class hours on Saturdays, while he indicated that an important step was taken by “ending the bubbles”. “With great enthusiasm we start a new year in the City of Buenos Aires,” he said at the 21 D.E 5 school in the Nueva Pompeya neighborhood.

“We took the step of ending the bubbles, we can have this new breakthrough and we have to defend every minute of class. We have a project for free time and Saturday schools in which many children participate,” added Larreta and continued: “Also, the extended day becomes mandatory for sixth and seventh grade.” He said that it will be “ten hours in the week” that he considered “is a lot”, but that it will be done to recover class time. Much of the protocols put in place in educational establishments against the coronavirus last year were deregulated. There are no more bubbles, no isolations by close contact or distancing, while in the City, the use of a mask is mandatory for students from fourth grade onwards. In the Federal Capital, 107,556 students from the initial level and 282,091 from the primary level returned to the classrooms, while the schedule will be completed on March 2 with the return to classes of some 198,836 secondary students, according to the Ministry of Education of Buenos Aires. Mendoza is the other district that began classes on Monday, with the return to the classrooms of some 443,701 students of all levels. The “Safe Classroom” protocol establishes that the school must collect information on vaccination against the coronavirus from the entire educational community, as well as that of the national calendar. They also stressed that bubbles will be eliminated and full attendance will be returned. Another novelty is that from this year the lists of students are not divided into gender. As established today in the Official Gazette of Mendoza through resolution 31,565, “there are no foundations that support this differentiating criterion, beyond the one derived from uses and customs.” The official act for the beginning of the school year in Mendoza was held in a school in the department of Junín in which the absence of the governor, Rodolfo Suárez, stood out, while the ceremony was presided over by his vice, Mario Abed. On the occasion, the General Director of Schools, José Thomas, emphasized the existence of “a post-pandemic starting point” in which we must “return to a surpassing normality and provide a better education for our children.”

Original source in Spanish