And while Hartin spends tonight out of prison, students will be spending the last week of their academic year outside of the classroom. After nearly two months of schools reopening for in - class instruction, the Ministry of Education has announced the face-to-face classes will be ending on June 18th. This comes after the Ministry of Health expressed concern about COVID clusters popping up in various schools.
It's another blow to the education of students - after spending a year doing online classes and finally gaining some sense of normalcy, they will be back to staring at a screen instead of a chalkboard. And for those who still don't have devices, well, they'll be back to working from paper packages.
But Ministry of Education CEO Dian Maheia said there isn't much to be concerned about since they are pulling the plug on face to face classes almost at the natural end of the school year. She says this won't deter the ministry from reopening classes back in September - or maybe even sooner.
Dian Maheia, CEO, Ministry of Education
"It's actually a reality that we expect because we're living in a pandemic so that we know that we have to be prepared. I think it would have been a little naïve for us to think that we would have been able to move through without having any incidents of COVID. Now we'll say that, starting on April 12th, we had our first group that started on April 12th, we had the second that started May 10th, we actually greenlighted 352 schools in total and it wasn't until more recently that we began to see a slight increase in COVID cases in some of the schools and so that's why when the Ministry of Health contacted us and said we're very concerned, we don't want to wait, you know, they wanted to be sure that they were alerting us and keep us informed and we agreed that we would listen to their recommendation."
Courtney Menzies:
"Is the Ministry still looking at September for reopening face to face classes?"
Dian Maheia, CEO, Ministry of Education
"Yes… possibly even earlier, it would depend on the way that we decide how we're going to structure the school year, how the COVID numbers are, because we have to remain flexible and we have to be prepared."
Courtney Menzies:
"Something like this may happen again where another cluster would be discovered in schools so you're prepared to have a situation where you open the classes, and close them, and open them back, repeatedly."
Dian Maheia, CEO, Ministry of Education
"That's what's happening across the world, it really is. We have the technology, we have access to information right now that we may be able to do tracking so this is not necessarily to say that we would need to close all schools in all districts at one given time. We made this decision right now simply because we really are at the end of the academic are, we are. Maybe if we were in the middle of the academic year, we would have responded a little differently. But now we know that schools are winding down, doing all their usual concluding activities so that's why we decided we would do it this way."
Maheia said that one of the contributing factors to the COVID cases was the low number of teachers who have been vaccinated. While the ministry had hoped for 50% before school reopened, they've only just recently passed that benchmark. As of Monday, 57.4%, or 3,463 teachers, have gotten at least their first dose.
