And yesterday, Minister of State in the Ministry of Education, Dr Louis Zabaneh gave us a brief update on their own protocols for keeping kids safe. But for a lot of students, they are forced to stay home because their parents won't allow them to go to school. He explained that while they have all necessary precautions in place, they still have to respect parents' decisions:
Hon. Dr. Louis Zabaneh - Minister of State, Ministry of Education
"There's no guarantee about exactly what will happen but we believe strongly that once we follow these protocols that have worked that we would then have a great chance of the safety of our children, that's paramount. We've also shared with parents certain practices that we would like them to follow, so that if for example they see any of their kids having any signs of flu like symptoms, etc., keep them at home so the success of this reopening will depend on all of us working together so it's not just the schools themselves but the community, the parents, everybody working together and we will not know unless we do it."
Reporter
"What about the parents who keep their children at home? A lot of parents are not sending their children to school and the teachers cannot do both, they can't do online or packages and teach kids in class so what happens to those kids?"
Hon. Dr. Louis Zabaneh
"Well, we say in those particular cases, we are inviting parents to communicate with the school administration, with the principals, because we find out many times parents are not sending the kids because they don't fully understand what the protocols really are and when they do that, from our experience with last year, we find that parents understand that with committed teachers and principals, that their kids might be even more safe inside a school environment that being outside, many of them unsupervised, running around in the neighborhood, that sort of thing. So number one we're asking parents who feel that way to please communicate with their principals with their teachers and understand what it is that we're trying to do. Ultimately the parents will decide. We have lost quite a bit over the past almost two years and so we're hoping that parents will be able to see that we are doing the best that we can and ultimately it will be their call so at the end of the day if they have done all their due diligence and they still feel that way, we have to respect that."
