“Like Russian roulette, every morning”

Despite the outcry made by the teachers, Education Minister Yoav Galant announced that classes at special education institutions will take place during the closure for five days a week, until 2 p.m. “Continuing education is an educational and moral order that ensures the continuum of educational, emotional and therapeutic responses required for students with special needs,” Galant’s office said.

The Teachers’ Union has been struggling in recent days with this decision and has demanded that all teaching staff be vaccinated. She threatens that if teachers are not vaccinated by next Tuesday, she will shut down the education system. In the special education system, 280,000 students study in kindergartens and schools.

The post-primary teachers’ organization also joined the protest and announced that it would provide legal backing to teachers who were chosen not to attend schools, for fear that they or their families would be infected. “The teachers are not cannon fodder, they are sent to the front without protection. The ministers of education and health are sacrificing them on the wheels of the political struggle between them,” said the organization’s chairman Ran Erez.

Special education teachers are now facing a difficult dilemma due to their fear of being infected, or infecting their families. “I’m kissing at 60, I don’t want to get infected,” the teacher said from the humiliation. “Students are not careful, they do not understand the meaning and danger. I beg the students to put on a mask and tell them ‘you are endangering me’, but they are not to blame. I’m afraid to get infected and infect my family. “

Katie Fergin, a special education teacher at the Ofer School in Haifa, is also worried. “My fear is for me and the children, that they too will not be infected,” says Fergin. “They are not able to wear masks and they are also prone to infection.”

Fergin added: “There’s no way we can keep our distance because the kids need us, we take them to the bathroom, we wipe the runny nose, there are students we feed them. There are kids who come from hostels and need warmth and love and we connect and caress them.

She said she tried to get vaccinated but was refused: “Because I am not suitable by age and teachers do not deserve it.” Fergin further said she is particularly apprehensive about infecting her ailing mother. “Her immune system is weak. I am an only child so I can only treat her because the caregiver left when the corona started,” she said.

She noted that she had already been twice required to go into solitary confinement after in two different cases two of her students were diagnosed with coronary heart disease. “With all the love for the students and the care for them, I will not be able to go to school on Sunday and endanger me, my students and my mother,” she added.

“Special education cannot be excluded,” says Dr. Michal Ben-David, principal of a special education school and a representative of the special education teaching staff at the Teachers’ Union. “We love our students, but it is not possible for full-time special education frameworks to operate without vaccinating The teachers, without distinguishing between the mild and complex disabilities. There is a contagion of a large number of staff and students who come in crowded shuttles even from red areas, enter different classrooms and have difficulty keeping distance. Most of them need the contact and physical care of a number of staff members, who do everything to provide an individual response to the needs of each student. “

“The crew members wear masks for whole days,” Ben-David added, “but Students do not wear masks, meet the whole staff in the absence of capsules and restrictions and meet at breaks all together. During the closure, the situation will worsen even more, since there are already no substitutes and supporters of teaching. “

“The frameworks are collapsing,” Ben-David added. “The reality is difficult and the morbidity is rising. We need to stop and examine how to back up such a fateful decision by leaving the frameworks open and understand that without vaccines, in shared transportation. In the many infections today teachers pay a heavy and unbearable price and their health and lives are worthless.”

According to Ben-David, “Special education teams work in complex conditions when they go into morning isolation, contracting and contagious. We are required to especially touch complex disabilities, clear rhinitis, salivation, change clothes to pick up and assist and there are also pool and physiotherapy treatments. It is impossible without contact in special education. Contact is also required with the light populations in the emotional aspect and in the complex populations the contact is existential “.

Ahali Buki, principal of the Branco Weiss High School in the Golan Heights Challenge School, also expresses frustration at the treatment she feels special education teachers receive. “We do our work out of faith, love and inner devotion, but this feeling that we are transparent and that no one really sees or appreciates is unbearable. “I feel that my teachers are being left alone in the field, that the state is abandoning us,” she said.

Buki adds: “The special education teams and schools for at-risk youth worked and operated in all the closures there were, the students came and it was necessary and necessary for them. But what we see in the current wave is insane morbidity flooding the communities from which the students come to us. The teachers, I too have gone into isolation, the corona is hitting hard on the education system and we have teachers who have already gone into isolation for the fifth time.The teachers are coming in with high readiness and fighting spirit for the children, but there is a feeling that we are just being abandoned.

Hila Tal, a citizenship teacher at the Branko Weiss Challenge School in Or Yehuda, complains that the teachers were not vaccinated. “The fact that men and women of education are not a priority for receiving a vaccine increases the fear of infection. After all, at the end of the day with the students who are all my world, I return home, to my family that I do not want to endanger,” says Tal. “Let us continue to meet the girls and boys, continue to engage in the educational work we do, without fear for the well-being of our families.”

In the shadow of the teachers ‘protest, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that he complied with Defense Minister Bnei Gantz’s request to give priority to the teachers’ vaccination, but for the organizations the decision was made too late. The secretary general of the Teachers’ Union, Yaffa Ben-David, announced that kindergartens and special education schools will be closed on Tuesday, despite the announcement by the Prime Minister’s Office. “As long as teaching staff are not actually vaccinated, the labor dispute remains in effect. “When all teaching staff are vaccinated, we will be blessed for the implementation and not for the decision,” said the teachers’ union, which noted that distance learning will continue as usual.