After a 13 month COVID break, schools will start to re-open on April 12th, but - if you go by social media chatter - some parents still feel that it is not safe enough to send their kids back to school just yet.
But most of those parents need not to worry at this point, since the phased-in return to classes only concerns schools whose management chooses to reopen.
The Minister of Education told us today that there are a few schools who feel like they are ready to resume in person classes and those are the one that will be getting that chance after the Easter holiday.
But being ready is not the only requirement, as the Ministry has an extensive checklist for schools to pass to ensure that health and safety protocols are being met. And today, via Zoom, Minister Francis Fonseca went over some of those requirements. He also noted that online classes will not end altogether.
Hon. Francis Fonseca - Minister of Education "Schools have a plan in place for ensuring that their students wear masks. They should have wash stations available so that students and teachers can properly sanitize and wash their hands. We're following the guidelines from the Ministry of Health which say that really students need a distance of about 3 feet. It used to be 6 feet but now all the experts now say that 6 feet is no longer required, it's really 3 feet requirement for social distancing, so we'll try to accomplish that. Sanitization of the classroom, keeping the compound clean, ensuring that there are rules in place for students when they on campus, for parents when they are dropping off students, those types of things to ensure that there are proper rules in place and regulations in place. Some schools have this hybrid approach where they'll have 2 days at school in the classroom and 3 days remotely. Other schools will have proposed a shift system where certain classes come in the morning, some classes come in the afternoon or some students come for particular days of the week, other students come on other days of the week, so there are different approaches being taken. For most schools it will be, certainly for the plans you've seen for the ones in April, there will be a hybrid approach to learning, to reopening so that they will still have a component of online learning."
The second part of this phased-in approach begins May 10th and will once again be optional.
But what about those parents who feel ill-prepared to send their children to school? Well, the minister said they should have been preparing all this time since the ministry's main goal was to always reopen schools.
But he added that uniforms and textbooks wouldn't be mandatory and that schools will have to work with parents who are unable to purchase them.
Hon. Francis Fonseca "Well first of all I don't accept that it's short notice, we've working on this for months and months and we've been saying I know from day one that I became Minister of Education, I made it clear that our number one objective is to get our students back into the classroom. We established a task force, the covid task force specifically for that purpose to guide us and to make recommendations for how we can properly and responsibly return to the classroom. So, it's not short notice and we've been having this dialogue with the Belize National Teachers Union, without general managers, with the Belize Association of Principals, of secondary schools, with all of the stakeholders in education, so it's a flexible approach. In terms of parents we've made it very clear in the release we put out that schools are not to insist that students must have uniforms or they must have all their books, we made that very clear because we are sensitive to the fact that they country is in an economic crisis, many parents are out of work, many families are struggling, so we understand that and we've made it very clear that schools have to appreciate and understand that. So, there is no mandate for uniforms and books and all these things, schools have to work with parents and try to do their best to assist them and support them."
The minister added that with teachers getting vaccinated, all schools will be expected to reopen at the start of the next academic school year.
He noted that in the first two or three days of phase 2 of the vaccine rollout, over 800 teachers received their vaccinations. That's about 20% of the 4,000 persons in the teaching profession.
