Parents and children in Slovenia on Monday staged new protests against a long-lasting closure of schools while Prime Minister Janez Jansa said the protests were politically motivated and constituted abuse of children.

Under the latest government decision, kindergarten children and pupils in the first three grades of primary school in seven Slovenian regions are allowed to attend face-to-face classes for a second consecutive week.

Schools in five other regions have again switched to online classes and kindergartens there are open only for essential purposes.

That means that around 16,000 primary school pupils will have online classes while about 48,000 will have face-to-face classes. Nationwide, remote learning will continue for higher grades of primary schools and for secondary school students.

Parents unhappy with ongoing remote learning

Parents as well as pedagogues in the country are increasingly unhappy with remote learning having been going on for most students for more than three months.

Apart from protests in Koper and Trbovlje, which are in the two regions where remote learning was reintroduced after only five days of face-to-face classes, protests were also staged in Ljubljana, Maribor and some other cities.

PM Jansa has described the protests as “unreasonable and dangerous abuse of children for political purposes”, noting in a Twitter post that the epidemiological situation in the country and the two regions where schools had to switch back to online classes would be better if government restrictions were not being defied.

He repeated last week that the reopening of all schools requires reducing the daily number of new infections to fewer than 1,000 and the number of people hospitalised for COVID-19 to under 1,000.

That goal does not seem to be quite near. According to the latest information, 1,066 people are being treated in hospitals for COVID-19 while the average daily number of new infections in the past seven days is 1,230.

The government said on Monday that 4,684 tests conducted in the past 24 hours had confirmed 353 infections, which is a slight increase compared to the situation of seven days ago. Nineteen people have died of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours, putting the death toll at 3,522.