Closing schools to force parents to work from home was simply wrong, says union

The second coronavirus-related school closures in the Netherlands in mid-December 2020 caused “confusion and frustration among parents” because the Cabinet said the closures were to let parents work from home, not to protect the children, the Dutch Safety Board said in its second coronavirus report on Wednesday. That is simply wrong, education union AOb said.

“This report confirms that the school closures were also taken to force parents to work from home,” AOb chairman Tamar van Gelder said. School closures are “so drastic” for the pupils that they can only be allowed if they are purely and exclusively to protect the health of the pupils and their teachers.

The Safety Board said that it is still unclear whether the school closures had any effect on the spread of the coronavirus, NU.nl reported. The Outbreak Management Team never calculated the effects of the first school closure in March 2020 and therefore had no data to work on when closing schools again in December.

A spokesperson for the AOb called that “terrible” because these were “no small decisions.” She can imagine that it happened in the vein of rather be safe than sorry. “But then the threat must be serious.”

Instead of closing schools, the government could have made it mandatory for parents to work from home if their profession allowed it, the Safety Board said. That would not have made the children the victim of the measure.