Education Minister Priya Manickchand announced on Monday that all schools will be fully reopened on April 25.
This reopening comes over two years after the COVID pandemic struck, forcing a closure to reduce an infection spread. Now, when school reopens after the Easter holiday break, all students will be returning to a classroom setting.
Education Minister Priya Manickchand
The Minister told media operatives on the sidelines of an event that there will be a staggered opening so as to not overwhelm the system. At present, there has been some degree of classroom activity on a rotation basis.
“We are making sure, physically, the schools are ready to be reopened fully from April 25 after the Easter holiday. There is a staggered reopening not to shock the system after these two years of closure. Within the first week, grades will be going out back at different dates. We will announce that shortly, with the last grade being Grade Seven and nursery the following week,” she indicated.
Along with putting physical resources in schools to encourage a safe learning space, authorities also managed to refine the curriculum to offer only information that is necessary for learners.
“We’re trying to make sure that our schools are equipped and ready. Outside of that, we have done a whole host of things. We have consolidated all the curriculum so from Grades One to Nine, we have shaved off things that are not necessary. We have made the curriculum into a 20-week curriculum. We have completely changed the way Grade Six is going to be written.”
The Ministry has taken the initiative to offer the syllabus of one grade lower for students, and then when this is completed, the respective grade-level curriculum is introduced. Most importantly, each child will be diagnosed to assess the level of learning loss due to COVID.
“You’re going to see an assault on illiteracy. You’ll see an entire national programme rolled out to recover from the literacy loss that we would have had and all the gains we would have made that went down the drain in two years…We’re issuing a diagnostic for Mathematics, English, Social Studies and Science. Every student will be diagnosed and each student will be attended to individually to make sure that we recover from the COVID loss,” Manickchand.
Absenteeism
Leading up to the reopening, Operation Recovery was piloted to address absenteeism and get students back into classrooms. Dubbing it a successful mechanism, the Education Minister outlined that such actions will continue.
“We’ve gotten more than three-quarters of the kids back in school. We started with a number of about 1300 that were absent…It was never intended to be a one-day, or one-week activity. Operation Recovery is going to be a prolonged activity. We started with Grade Six because we knew they had to be out. Once everybody comes back out, and is duty-bound to come back out, then we could look to see who is absent,” said the Minister.
Through encounters with students, it was found that the reasons for absenteeism ranged from poverty to “carelessness’” There was the stark reality of some being oblivious to the upcoming exams that they were scheduled to sit.
She identified, “We saw children not coming out because they were babysitting other younger siblings…We saw people who did not even know that there were exams. We saw children being out so long that they heading towards being dropouts, so a range of issues that all tended towards the need for the school and education department to be more conscious of the effects of a two-year closure.”
It was positioned that officials should not depend on statistics to highlight dropouts, but rather a proactive approach from teachers or immediate personnel in the school system to identify such trends.
Last month, the Education Ministry underscored that urgent, practical, sustained measures such as teaching and learning from a consolidated curriculum; the provision of textbooks, re-training of teachers, using technology in the classroom, and Operation Recovery would mitigate against the predicted loss to our students and country. (G12)
