The OP proposed to include communication in parent chats during the teacher's working hours

On October 6, Vladislav Grib, Deputy Secretary of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, made a proposal to count the time spent by teachers communicating with parents in messengers and by phone as official working hours.

"I believe that teachers should be counted during working hours or even allocated special hours for chatting with parents. Phone calls, online meetings — it should be at the expense of not personal, but working time," he said in an interview with TASS.

Grib noted that correspondence and personal interaction with parents should be allocated from one to one and a half hours in the teacher's schedule. According to him, such a measure will avoid situations in which teachers are forced to spend their evenings on work communications.

Free museum ticket and legal assistance: what does a teacher have to do in 2026

The presidential decree consolidated the special status of teachers and added several new benefits at once.

Ekaterina Boronkina, a business psychologist and head of the online school PUZZLE Academy of Psychological Excellence, told Izvestia on October 5 that teachers burn out faster than representatives of many other professions because they work not only with knowledge, but also with their own emotional state. The psychologist also cited data from a 2020 study: 75% of Russian teachers had severe symptoms of burnout, and 38% of them had burnout in an acute phase.