Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Ed­u­ca­tion Dis­trict Health Units (ED­HU) and rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Coun­ty Med­ical Of­fi­cer of Health of­fices will soon en­gage school of­fi­cials to dis­cuss COVID-19 case man­age­ment in de­tail.

The an­nounce­ment came from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion last evening, fol­low­ing a meet­ing with ed­u­ca­tion stake­hold­ers where COVID-19 in schools was a part of the dis­cus­sion and al­so led to the up­dat­ing of pro­to­cols. 

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from the min­istry yes­ter­day, it “pre­pared and is­sued to all prin­ci­pals and stake­hold­ers a COVID-19 Case Man­age­ment Guide which pro­vides greater de­tail re­gard­ing the pro­ce­dure for man­ag­ing both sus­pect­ed and pos­i­tive cas­es of the COVID-19 virus in schools.”

From May 11, it said prin­ci­pals, mid­dle man­agers, vice prin­ci­pals and se­nior teach­ers of each ed­u­ca­tion dis­trict will be ap­proached by the ED­HU and CMOH of­fice rep­re­sen­ta­tives to dis­cuss the case man­age­ment in fur­ther de­tail. 

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia fol­low­ing the meet­ing, act­ing Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary of the Sanatan Dhar­ma Ma­ha Sab­ha (SDMS), Vi­jay Ma­haraj, said they raised the is­sue of in­con­sis­tent pro­to­cols be­ing used be­tween ed­u­ca­tion dis­tricts in man­ag­ing con­firmed cas­es or sus­pect­ed cas­es in the class­room. 

“If we take one dis­trict and a child is sus­pect­ed of COVID and has COVID in that par­tic­u­lar dis­trict, the prin­ci­pal will be told who are the four chil­dren seat­ed around...so they will al­so go in­to quar­an­tine,” he said.

“But in oth­er dis­tricts, they are send­ing the en­tire class home.” 

He said he al­so called for the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion to col­lab­o­rate with the Min­istry of Health to is­sue week­ly up­dates on the COVID-19 case load with­in the pub­lic school sys­tem.

The last of­fi­cial count places 316 COVID-19 cas­es com­ing from staff and stu­dents of at least 243 schools since the term be­gan on April 19. It av­er­ages to just over one case per af­fect­ed school. How­ev­er, par­ents’ con­cerns con­tin­ue to grow. Some have even called for phys­i­cal class­es to be scrapped in favour of a re­turn to on­line class. How­ev­er, the de­nom­i­na­tion­al board schools don’t sup­port that call. 

Pres­by­ter­ian School Board chair­man Vick­ram Ram­lal said it has al­ready no­ticed a sig­nif­i­cant loss of learn­ing when chil­dren re­turned af­ter two years away and now fears the dam­age that will be done should there be a re­turn to on­line class­es or asyn­chro­nous learn­ing.

Ram­lal said the board has be­tween 115 and 120 con­firmed COVID-19 cas­es across 52 of its schools. 

AS­JA pres­i­dent Gen­er­al Ha­jji Zain­ool Sarafat was not in a po­si­tion to give ex­act fig­ures but con­firmed there are cas­es in their schools. How­ev­er, he too shared Ram­lal’s sen­ti­ments. 

“It is far more ad­van­ta­geous than the on­line and syn­chro­nous as well be­cause hav­ing the chil­dren there and teach­ing them in front of you...and teach­ing them one to one- the chil­dren grasp the con­cepts more read­i­ly than if it’s on­line,” he said. 

The SDMS act­ing gen­er­al sec­re­tary said schools were be­ing un­fair­ly judged un­der a mi­cro­scope by the pub­lic. He said out of the 11,000 stu­dents un­der the SDMS, just 56 had con­firmed in­fec­tions which equates to 0.509 per cent. 

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