Safety of pupils, staff worries principals

SCHOOLS will have one week to prepare before opening when the country moves to Alert Level 3, but Otago principals have echoed the concerns of others over the safety of staff and pupils.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Thursday that under Level 3 restrictions, early childhood centres and schools would be open for children up to year 10.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson said yesterday schools would have one week to prepare when the announcement was made.

Attendance would be voluntary, but the change allowed parents to return to work if they had safe conditions in place.

Otago Secondary Principals’ Association president Linda Miller said it was good schools would have one week before opening, but said there was worry surrounding the workload for teachers and staff and pupil safety.

“Schools will expose pupils to greater risk than staying in their bubble.”

She thought the majority of teachers would continue to work from home, delivering online lessons to pupils at all levels.

“A skeleton staff would be needed to provide supervision to students who do attend, who will be carrying out online learning with their peers who remain at home.”

It would be difficult for teachers to manage online learning alongside having pupils in classrooms and support and guidance would need to be provided.

“Something like access to flu injections for staff would help, but that doesn’t seem to be possible at the moment.

“Principals are anxious to get more information from the Government. We are hoping that will be forthcoming next week.”

Otago Primary Principals’ Association president Shelley Wilde said schools still had many questions about what Level 3 would look like, and the implications of managing both distance and facetoface learning during the coming weeks.

“Once these are known, schools will move into the next phase of planning how to ensure they provide environments that are as safe as possible for the learners and employees they do have on site.”

Both Ms Miller and Ms Wilde encouraged pupils to stay at home if possible, even when isolation rules were relaxed.

Dunedin Kindergarten Association senior teacher Christine Kerr said centres around the city were ready, but warned returning children could potentially be exposed to an infectious environment.

“It’s a very closecontact environment. Children playing together — there’s no way you could say to a 2 or 3yearold, ‘please keep a metre of distance between you’.’’