There is no doubt some mea­sures of con­cern in the min­istries of health and ed­u­ca­tion as schools re­open for a new school year to­day.

From a health per­spec­tive, it’s the first time that thou­sands of stu­dents will be con­gre­gat­ing with­out a mask man­date in place. For Ed­u­ca­tion, it’s about find­ing ways to re­cov­er from the huge drops in aca­d­e­m­ic ac­com­plish­ments as a re­sult of the changes brought on by the pan­dem­ic.

Of the two, the health con­cerns ap­pear now to be of some­what less­er im­port.

Al­though the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion can no longer man­date the wear­ing of masks since the law keep­ing it in place ex­pired dur­ing the school hol­i­days on Ju­ly 17, it has giv­en prin­ci­pals the lee­way of dis­cre­tion in man­ag­ing their schools.

Sev­er­al schools have al­ready gone this route, alert­ing par­ents through school emails that chat groups, that their schools will be strong­ly en­cour­ag­ing mask-wear­ing.

When one con­sid­ers that the coun­try has had many mask­less su­per spread­er events in the forms of fetes and pub­lic gath­er­ings that did not re­sult in a cat­a­stroph­ic re­turn to the cas­es and deaths we saw in the past, the fears of a boom aris­ing from schools that don’t en­cour­age mask-wear­ing are great­ly less­ened.

The big­ger con­cern now is the ed­u­ca­tion re­cov­ery af­ter 52.6 per cent of the stu­dents who did the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) this year, scored less than 50 per cent.

Of that num­ber, 3,000 pupils were placed in schools al­though they score un­der 30 per cent.

This places added pres­sure on teach­ers of Form One class­es who now have the added task of bring­ing stu­dents up to stan­dard be­fore pro­gress­ing with the syl­labus­es.

With­out care­ful man­age­ment of this process, they run the risk of frus­trat­ing those who are be­hind, with the po­ten­tial for dam­age to their con­fi­dence and es­teem and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of in­creas­ing dropouts along the way.

The Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry had al­lo­cat­ed $10 mil­lion to­ward re­me­di­al class­es dur­ing the hol­i­days and has al­so put in place a mea­sur­ing mech­a­nism in the form of a sec­ond test to be done by those stu­dents who scored be­low 50 per cent, when they reach Form Two.

This is a good start but the Min­istry must en­sure that the prop­er psy­cho­log­i­cal and ad­min­is­tra­tive sup­port is giv­en to teach­ers who face the bur­den of rais­ing stu­dents’ stan­dards.

There must be sys­tems in place to mon­i­tor and res­cue those who sim­ply can­not catch up fast enough.

Pri­ma­ry school teach­ers are al­so en­ter­ing this new school term with ad­di­tion­al bur­dens know­ing ful­ly well that they are ex­pect­ed to im­prove up­on the grades of the past year.

This is no easy fix. The fact that the on­line class­es are done and face-to-face teach­ing has re­sumed, of­fers no guar­an­tee of bet­ter per­for­mances.

It’s ob­vi­ous now that the de­gree of at­ten­tion that must be placed on Stan­dard Five stu­dents has to sig­nif­i­cant­ly ex­ceed what has been giv­en be­fore.

Those teach­ers are be­ing called up­on to work rapid­ly to ad­vance the stu­dents whose learn­ing have re­gressed dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, with the SEA ex­am­i­na­tion just six months away.

All this, com­ing in an en­vi­ron­ment in which teach­ers are de­mand­ing more than the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer’s four per cent of­fer, makes this new school term high­ly un­pre­dictable.

The Min­istry and its sub­sidiaries un­der­stand­ably face quite a hefty task man­ag­ing these com­plex­i­ties.

As ed­u­ca­tor Collen Wilcox fa­mous­ly said, how­ev­er, “Teach­ing is the great­est act of op­ti­mism.”

And it is ‘op­ti­mism’ in­deed that we wish to send as the mes­sage, know­ing that as re­silient peo­ple we’d find that the right amount of strate­gies mixed with the right amount of at­ten­tion, will take us the suc­cess we wish for among our stu­dents.