Catholic Board not surprised by challenges with devices

CATHOLIC Education Board of Management (CEBM) CEO Sharon Mangroo is not surprised by a statement issued last week by the Education Ministry that 30,000 students still do not have access to electronic devices to use for virtual schooling during the new school term, which began on Monday.

Mangroo said, "The initial surveys asked how many students had access to a device. As long as there was one device in a family, the response was affirmative.

She pointed out that few, if any households have a device for each member of the family.

"Therefore the more accurate figure for children needing device would have been the entire population of primary-school-aged children."

She added, "At secondary level, some older students may have had their own device, so possibly the secondary school-aged population, minus five to ten per cent, would yield the starting figure."

Acknowledging that individual and corporate sponsors have been generous in donating devices to the Education Ministry, Mangroo suggested that the ministry should subtract the numbers of devices donated or bought from the school population, to see how many devices are still needed. She believes even after this is done "the figure will still be very high."

Going into 2021, Mangroo said the three biggest lessons the CEBM learnt about the impact of the covid19 pandemic on education were: "We are resilient, successess (come) from working together towards a common goal;and the importance of respectful and frequent communication among all the stakeholders."

She believed the new approach taken by the ministry, of including stakeholders in discussions and decisons and increased communication between teachers and parents, is bearing good fruit. "We are still growing into the situation but we have been doing so with some measure of success."

Mangroo also said that within the RC system, "Our teachers shared their expertise," explaining that those teachers who are tech-savvy helped train others and remain a resource base. Teachers shared lessons and virtual classroom resources."

Mangroo added, "Collaboration among education stakeholders is also enabling sharing of resources as well as building goodwill."