70 COVID CASES RECORDED IN SCHOOLS
At least 70 children and staff at schools have contracted COVID- 19 since the reopening of schools for face-to-face learning.
Education Minister Fayval Williams yesterday said that 41 schools have reported a positive or suspected case of the novel coronavirus, and given the spike in the numbers among the general population, the Government has decided to pull the plug on face-to-face classes in public schools, except for students in grades six, 11, 12 and 13.
“All other students would be required to stay at home and utilise the online learning platform or the audiovisual learning approach,” Williams said.
PARTIAL SHUTDOWN
Within the schools, Williams said that there have been 47 positive cases and a further six suspected cases. Additionally, there have been 23 positive cases among staff and 18 suspected cases.
Williams said that the decision to trigger the partial shutdown of face- to- face learning was informed by a risk- based assessment.
“We continue to input new data that we receive into the model, and as we analyse the data as we go along, we cannot ignore the caution lights that we are seeing from this data,” Williams said.
The closure notice, Williams later clarified, applies only to public schools. “Private schools are like business so we are only speaking to public schools,” she said.
She did not say whether the risk assessment found privately run schools to be less affected by COVID-19. Meanwhile, the minister has appealed to stakeholders to support the new face-to-face policy.
“We are asking our principals, our teachers, our parents to work with us on this as we live through this pandemic ... . We have to do everything that we can to get all of us through it safely. These are some of the changes that we have to make,” the minister said.