Few cases of school sit-ins amid drive to provide masks

As authorities scrambled to arrange for new masks to be sent to several schools that received oversized ones on the first day of the academic year on Monday, resistance to the mandatory use of face masks was in evidence at a handful of schools around the country. 

Pupils protesting about the regulation stipulating the use of masks, and their parents, staged sit-ins at schools in Hania on Crete and in Patra in western Greece. 

Meanwhile Greece’s Union of Municipalities and Communities (KEDE) was arranging the delivery of new masks to schools where the provision on Monday of ill-fitting masks had prompted protests by parents. 

“We must make pupils, along with their parents, understand that the use of a mask is the appropriate preventive measure against the spread of the coronavirus,” a high-ranking Education Ministry official told Kathimerini.