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Ministry: Schools should reject students after trips abroad

Ayee Macaraig
June 11th, 2020


This article is more than 4 years old.

Teachers say the responsibility must lie with the parents, not the children

More resources needed for struggling children (photo: Pixabay/Alicja)

Students who spent holidays in countries where the government advised against travel due to the coronavirus must be quarantined for 14 days and refused entry in schools, according to a recommendation from the Ministry of Culture.

Daycare centres, schools, colleges and other educational institutions “can and should” refuse to receive the students based on the recommendation, as reported by Jyllands-Posten.

The government has allowed Danes to travel only to Germany, Norway and Iceland from Monday, advising them against staying in populous cities.

Parents’ responsibility
The recommendation comes a week after five students from Roskilde Cathedral School tested positive for the virus following a holiday trip to Sweden. This led to the school cancelling classes for first year students for two weeks.

The teachers’ association and the union of teachers called for a decision on how the ministry’s guidelines should be implemented in each municipality. They argued that individual schools must not be left to interpret the rules.

“The hard part is knowing if people have been away. If there is suspicion, we must call the parents to ask. You should not ask the kids, that’s not fair,” said Claus Hjortdal, the head of the school leaders’ association.

Local authority
Hanne Hartoft, an associate professor of law at Aalborg University, said that decisions on whether to quarantine a student must be done locally.

She stressed, however, that measures must be taken to ensure that students under quarantine have access to education.


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A survey carried out by Megafon for TV2 has found that 71 percent of parents have handed over children to daycare in spite of them being sick.

Moreover, 21 percent of those surveyed admitted to medicating their kids with paracetamol, such as Panodil, before sending them to school.

The FOLA parents’ organisation is shocked by the findings.

“I think it is absolutely crazy. It simply cannot be that a child goes to school sick and plays with lots of other children. Then we are faced with the fact that they will infect the whole institution,” said FOLA chair Signe Nielsen.

Pill pushers
At the Børnehuset daycare institution in Silkeborg a meeting was called where parents were implored not to bring their sick children to school.

At Børnehuset there are fears that parents prefer to pack their kids off with a pill without informing teachers.

“We occasionally have children who that they have had a pill for breakfast,” said headteacher Susanne Bødker. “You might think that it is a Panodil more than a vitamin pill, if it is a child who has just been sick, for example.”

Parents sick and tired
Parents, when confronted, often cite pressure at work as a reason for not being able to stay at home with their children.

Many declare that they simply cannot take another day off, as they are afraid of being fired.

Allan Randrup Thomsen, a professor of virology at KU, has heavily criticised the parents’ actions, describing the current situation as a “vicious circle”.

“It promotes the spread of viruses, and it adds momentum to a cycle where parents are pressured by high levels of sick-leave. If they then choose to send the children to daycare while they are still recovering, they keep the epidemic going in daycares, and this in turn puts a greater burden on the parents.”