Back to school

THE 2021/2022 academic year has started the same way as 2020/2021 – with our students and teachers still engaging in remote learning via online platforms. The challenges that confronted us then are still very evident with us now and it seems they will be for a while as we try to negotiate what everyone (tongue in cheek) continues to refer to as the “new normal.” What has changed? Anything?

In the period leading up to the reopening of school, the Prime Minister and the Government sought to address the situation through the use of a state of emergency to limit movement and socialising among the general public, the acquisition of vaccines towards the herd immunity target for which the goalposts appear to be shifting with the ongoing identification of variants (with the contagious delta variant now present among us), and ongoing advocacy for individuals to get vaccinated, including school-age children.

The Ministry of Education, in anticipation of face-to-face, in-person schooling, even engaged stakeholders in discussions with respect to the guidelines that were drafted to enable school to take place while maintaining the protocols necessary for the continued well-being of students, teachers and other school personnel. While there were hesitant groups, there were still many who felt that face-to-face school would be in the best interest of our students.

Alas, this was not meant to be! With Monday – the first day of school – behind us, we are back to remote learning, still without a meaningful plan for reaching those students whose socio-economic conditions do not afford them the opportunity of either a device or access to technology-mediated learning opportunities. Additionally, while vaccines for children 12-18 have been made available, the anticipated uptake is not what the powers that be would like it to be.

There is hope that by October our secondary school students (particularly those in Forms 4 through 6) will be back in school, but we have been here before.

So what do we do now? How do we reach those students who may have fallen away in the preceding academic year? While there is an expectation that teachers and the association by extension have the answers to these questions, we do not, since everything is not under our control. We may have suggestions from our vantage points since our members are the personnel that have to enact the return to in-person schooling.

Additionally, there is an expectation that principals, as managers of the school plant, will make (or at least oversee) the physical infrastructural changes that are necessary to facilitate face-to-face schooling. While this may not be an unrealistic expectation, it is impossible for them to do it without the necessary financial resources, which of necessity must be provided by the Ministry of Education.

Then there is the issue of the metrics. Do we actually know the magnitude of the problem that faces us? Do we have the data to tell us who is affected and how? Data that is essential if we are to address the negative impact of covid19 that we can only intimate at without the relevant data.

An August 5 update from the US Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) outlines the following measures if schools are to physically reopen fully:

* Universal indoor masking by all students (age two and older), staff, teachers and visitors to schools, regardless of vaccination status.

* In addition to universal indoor masking, maintain at least three feet of physical distance between students within classrooms to reduce transmission risk. When it is not possible to maintain a physical distance of at least three feet, such as when schools cannot fully reopen while maintaining these distances, it is especially important to layer multiple other prevention strategies, such as screening testing.

* Screening testing, ventilation, hand-washing and respiratory etiquette, staying home when sick and getting tested, contact tracing in combination with quarantine and isolation, and cleaning and disinfection are also important layers of prevention to keep schools safe.

* Students, teachers and staff should stay home when they have signs of any infectious illness and be referred to their healthcare provider for testing and care.

These are a few of the recommendations, but critical ones. How prepared are we to ensure that all of this can happen effectively? Are co-ordinated systems in place to ensure that schools will have access to all the resources needed to ensure this? We all want our students back in school, but we must get it right.