Medical exemption from exercise in PE lessons should not mean that students lose contact with these classes at all. Those dismissed from general classes should follow the core curriculum with modifications - it follows from the discussion that took place on Thursday at the meeting of the joint parliamentary committees. The opposition accused the government of introducing chaos and uncertainty in schools in connection with the alleged change in the rules for issuing exemptions.
The long-term release from PE is questionable
Published Sept. 30, 2022 12:24
Fot. Thinkstock/Getty Images
During the joint meeting of the physical culture, sport and tourism committee and the health committee, one of the key topics was the rules for issuing long-term sick leave to students from physical education lessons, although the committees were rather to focus on how the program is implemented by students with such dismissals. compulsory PE classes.
Helena Marianowska, head of the department of the Department of Education and Inclusive Education of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, said that in accordance with the law, school principals and teachers are obliged to adapt the conditions so that children can participate in all compulsory classes. - There are situations where a student may be released from these classes for a specified period of time. The primary care physician knows the child and is empowered to give this opinion. He is also the doctor who makes health balances and also qualifies the child to a specific group of physical education - she emphasized.
Where did the doubts come from? It all started with the speech of the Minister of Sport Kamil Bortniczuk in July, who stated that because almost every third student presents a long-term exemption from PE, the rules will change and only exemptions from specialist doctors will be respected. The reaction of the community was immediate: the doctors recalled that specialists were also working in the POZ, which the minister pointed to as the source of the problem (allegedly, GPs would have to issue sick leave with a light hand). In addition, the ministry did not provide any data to support its claims - neither on the actual scale of the layoffs (on Thursday, an official from the Ministry of Education admitted that such information simply does not exist), or on the structure of the layoffs - such a certificate can now be issued by any doctor, there are many obtained during private medical visits, not only outside the health care center, but also outside the public system.
What's more - at the end of the summer holidays it turned out that the Ministry of Education did not take up the topic and the rules regarding the dismissals did not change, but in mid-September the Minister of Education and Science Przemysław Czarnek admitted that work on reforming the law had already begun. This has generated and is generating, as opposition MPs said, enormous chaos in schools - some of them no longer respect exemptions issued by GPs, although there are no legal grounds for this.
Katarzyna Lubneuer (KO) reminded representatives of the government (ministries were represented only by lower-ranking officials from the departmental level) that the outlined direction of changes is inconsistent with the one that is being forced by the Ministry of Health, trying to shift the greatest possible burden of patient care to the primary health care shorten the lines to specialists as much as possible and is detached from reality. - In some specializations, the waiting time for an appointment at the clinic is longer than the school year - she emphasized. PiS MPs retorted that at the moment patients have the opportunity to use the NHF's informant and find out that there are clinics within a radius of several dozen kilometers where the benefit can be obtained in a relatively short time.
