Closing schools is right — but let’s take this chance to fix them, too

It has been nine days since President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that schools would be closed for a period of four weeks in a bid to slow the rapidly increasing spread of Covid-19. The president and his National Coronavirus Command Council have many shortcomings, but this decision remains a correct and responsible one and I have no doubt history will prove this to be true.

The decision on whether or not to close schools is about stopping the spread of Covid-19 and saving lives. I, more than anyone, want all our pupils to return to schools that champion a reformed and equitable education system. But this cannot come at the expense of lives and the health and safety of our country’s most vulnerable communities.

At the time of writing, 106 countries have in place the countrywide closure of schools, including fellow Brics nations India and Brazil — who happen to be No 2 and No 3 in the world, respectively, in terms of the total number of positive cases.

Over 60% of enrolled school children globally are affected by school closures — more than 1-billion young people.

Despite initial uncertainty, it is now accepted that children can contract, carry and spread the virus. A recent study from South Korea found that while young children seem less able to spread the disease compared to adults, children aged 10 years and older spread the virus “at least as well as adults do”. Therefore schools, like other public gatherings, pose a massive health and safety risk.

If the central fight during the HIV/Aids pandemic was to prevent mother-to-child transmission, the Covid-19 pandemic as it relates to schools is about transmission from child to parent, grandparent and caregiver.

This is the chain of infection we seek to stop.

We also cannot ignore the safety of teachers and support staff in the education system. The teaching community has many teachers with high levels of pre-existing conditions, reflecting by and large the demographics of SA.

Moreover, of the 440,000 teachers across the country, the average age of a teacher is 43 and 34% of our teachers are over the age of 50. They need to be protected as well.

Of course, response to Covid-19 is contextual and will differ from country to country. This informs how we best respond. For SA, three key factors must be considered. These are the net amount of positive cases, the infection peak, and the state of our public education system.

On the first factor, as of July 29 SA sits fifth in the world in the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases, at more than 480,000. The only countries ahead of us are the US, Brazil, India and Russia — all of which have much bigger populations than ours. Moreover, the next African country on the list is Egypt, down at number 25 with about 93,000 cases. This is far from ideal.

Secondly, all credible data indicates that SA has yet to reach its infection peak and we are only now entering the real storm. Experience from other countries shows that limiting the peak is much trickier than it seems. Therefore, the closing of schools at this time makes an enormous amount of sense.

Thirdly, and arguably most relevantly, is the dire state of our education system and the horrific conditions in which millions of pupils have to learn every day.

We must be brutal with the truth: we do not have a resilient and sustainable education system that provides equality of opportunity for all. Rather, we have two education systems — one for the rich and another for the rest.

And this is not a private vs public school matter.

I attended a poor, under-resourced primary school in Dobsonville, Soweto, which happened to be a private Catholic school. My children attend wellresourced, quality primary schools that happen to be public schools.

The issue is fairness in access to quality education, which still largely mirrors pre-1994 patterns of structural inequality. This means poorer students, their families and their teachers are at much greater risk.

And those poor students should not be given the false choice between going to school and contracting Covid-19, or staying home and falling behind on their education. The closure of schools has equality at its heart.

Many lives will be saved due to the temporary closure of schools, but we dare not miss the opportunity this closure presents to fix our public education system, one that remains unequal and at the core of SA’s lack of progress and development.

Lack of resources, crumbling infrastructure, pit toilets, crowded classrooms, unaccountable teachers … the list goes on.

This is where the focus needs to be during this school closure period, and this is what the One South Africa Movement has been championing in the courts and on the streets.