In-person classes in the government-operated school system resumed last week Tuesday except for students on New Providence, Abaco and Eleuthera, where classes resumed virtually.
Virtual classes resumed for private school students in late September. And, limited in-class instruction began for some pre and primary schoolers.
Uneven access to internet services is dogging virtual education systems around the world. We are no exception.
Our challenge is exacerbated by unreliable electricity service.
Most public school students do not live in homes equipped with standby power generation. Nor are most parents or guardians in those homes able to afford the levels of supervision and support to children following classes online that is readily available to a large segment of private schoolers engaged in virtual education.
The government has said that students on the school meal program are being provided with tablets. Whether those students have access to the internet at home is unknown. And how many others, not yet on the school meal program, can afford the computer technology required to follow virtual education classes is another unknown.
A laudable but limited program was launched for disadvantaged school students in the Bain and Grants Town constituency facilitated by the area MP and the Graycliff Hotel and Restaurant.
It provides a supervised virtual learning space for as many as 72 area children on a rotation basis. Commendable but insufficient to meet what must be a huge unmet demand considering that more than 50,000 students are enrolled in the government-operated schools’ system.
The present disruption in public school education places many students at increased risk of falling behind.
If previously they were poorly equipped to compete with private school graduates who enjoy better appointed and equipped schools and easy access to technology, many disadvantaged public school students, shut out of their classrooms by the pandemic and without access to personal computers or tablets or adequate internet bandwidth, will surely suffer greater education losses.
Safely returning to the classroom must be the goal of our public education system.
The government has been silent on action taken to ensure that public schools that reopened for in-class instruction around the country have been reconfigured to conform with adequate physical distancing standards or to ensure that students observe other safety standards including wearing face masks and practicing frequent hand washing.
Having failed to employ extensive testing as a tool in the management of infections in the country, any expectation that students returning to the government schools will be required to submit negative COVID-19 tests ahead of re-entrance or thereafter to test periodically is highly unlikely.
Yet, such preventative actions are essential to the safe reopening of in-person education.
Recently, a school in a wealthy American suburb was forcibly closed after more than 70 staff and students tested positive for COVID-19 within 30 days of the school’s re-opening, largely attributed to lax observance of appropriate health safeguards.
UN agencies and national government leaders, particularly in Third World countries, have begun sounding the alarm. They estimate that as many as half the world’s children, some 600 million, have been affected by COVID-19 pandemic-related school closings. They warn of a real danger that progress made over the past decades in reducing poverty levels among children will be lost.
One school administrator in Peru succinctly put it this way: “We cannot allow education to go from being a right to becoming a luxury.”
Our reality remains that a return to the classroom is essential for most students in the government-operated school system. Failing that, many will drop out undetected in a virtual education system even before they reach the mandatory education age of 16. Most will swell the numbers of unemployed and unemployable in the economy.
This loss in education and skills-building will almost certainly reenforce cycles of poverty with horrendous implications for employable workers and hence our economy and social stability.
The post Those being left behind appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.
source https://thenassauguardian.com/those-being-left-behind/
No comments:
Post a Comment