Court orders the resumption of face-to-face classes in Buenos Aires

An appeals court has ordered the city of Buenos Aires to resume face-to-face classes, the head of government of the Argentine capital, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, announced on Sunday, in violation of a decree of the national government issued on Friday.

“For me it is a great pride to inform you that tomorrow the schools will be open” and there will be face-to-face classes, reiterated Larreta, who filed the lawsuit with the city’s Appeals Chamber after the government decree.

The announcement caused Buenos Aires parents to rush Sunday night to prepare their children’s backpacks and school supplies.

The government of President Alberto Fernández signed a decree on Friday that suspended face-to-face classes until April 30 in Buenos Aires and its surroundings, considering that this was one of the factors that influenced the rebound in coronavirus cases in the country.

“What they did is a legal mess. They are taking measures that are the exclusive source of federal justice. We are not dictating educational policy measures. They are health policy measures in a pandemic. That is why the city went straight to court,” Fernández explained to a local media outlet, in statements that the president retweeted after the ruling was announced.

The closure of schools has generated street protests, an avalanche of lawsuits filed by individuals, and calls for citizen rebellion by opponents, whom the ruling party accused of being a pro-death military at a time when Argentina is going through the worst time of the pandemic, registering an average of 25,000 new cases of coronavirus per day.

“We always make decisions based on evidence”, based on data and gathering the opinion of national and international experts in health and education, declared Larreta, addressing the entire city and the entire country that the battle between the governments is still alive.

“Education is the basis for the development of our society,” said the opposition leader, recalling the damage caused by the closure of classrooms and the virtual teaching modality for the most vulnerable sectors of the country.

“The school is not a place of contagion, those who are infected do not spread the contagion mostly around them, the data is overwhelming,” he said.

The outbreak of cases in Argentina occurs in the midst of a drop-in arrival of vaccines and an inoculation plan that is slower than the government would like.

So far, Argentina has registered about 2.7 million cases of coronavirus and more than 59,000 deaths from the disease.