Stan­dard Five stu­dents due to write the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment ex­am­i­na­tion will not be re­turn­ing to phys­i­cal class­rooms when schools re­open on April 12, as was pre­vi­ous­ly an­tic­i­pat­ed.

In­stead, as the third aca­d­e­m­ic term for 2020/2021 gets un­der­way, it will on­ly be stu­dents in Forms Four to Six who will re­turn.

In an­nounc­ing this via a re­lease yes­ter­day, the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion (MOE) said schools will con­tin­ue to op­er­ate on the hy­brid sys­tem that was in­tro­duced last Sep­tem­ber at the start of the aca­d­e­m­ic year.

The de­ci­sion was made dur­ing a mid-morn­ing meet­ing yes­ter­day be­tween Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly and Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh.

Fol­low­ing the ar­rival of the COVID-19 virus to Trinidad and To­ba­go on March 12, 2020 - a de­ci­sion was tak­en to close all schools a few days lat­er on March 16.

How­ev­er, when the new aca­d­e­m­ic term be­gan last Sep­tem­ber - ed­u­ca­tion of­fi­cials ad­vised that class­es would be con­duct­ed vir­tu­al­ly.

This was lat­er re­vised dur­ing the sec­ond term which ran from Jan­u­ary to March 2021, to al­low sec­ondary school stu­dents in Forms Four to Six to at­tend class­es in per­son but on­ly in the in­stances where they were re­quired to com­plete labs, school-based as­sess­ments, and in­ter­nal as­sess­ments.

Of­fi­cials yes­ter­day said this arrange­ment would re­main as is.

They stressed, “Stu­dents of Forms 4-6 will ac­cess phys­i­cal class­es for prac­ti­cal sub­ject com­po­nents ON­LY and all oth­er Sec­ondary, Pri­ma­ry and EC­CE stu­dents will con­tin­ue with the on­line or pack­age sys­tems.”

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley and Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly had pre­vi­ous­ly ex­pressed hope that Stan­dard Five stu­dents due to write the SEA ex­am on June 10, would have been able to re­turn to the phys­i­cal class­room.

It was on­ly two weeks ago that Row­ley urged the na­tion to act re­spon­si­bly dur­ing the East­er va­ca­tion as he said the re­open­ing of schools would de­pend on the num­ber of pos­i­tive COVID-19 cas­es record­ed dur­ing the two-week break.

Mean­while, of­fi­cials have as­sured that stu­dents will not suf­fer in any way at all as they said, “All ed­u­ca­tion­al ma­te­r­i­al pro­vid­ed by the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion via tele­vi­sion, ra­dio, print me­dia and on­line will con­tin­ue to be avail­able for stu­dent and par­ent ac­cess.”

The hy­brid school sys­tem, ac­cord­ing to of­fi­cials, will in­clude on­line class­es and pack­ages for stu­dent col­lec­tion; the phys­i­cal re­turn of sec­ondary school stu­dents to class­rooms will on­ly be for the com­ple­tion of lab prac­ti­cals, School-Based As­sess­ments (SBA’s) and In­ter­nal As­sess­ments (IA’s); and face-to-face class­es on­ly where ab­solute­ly nec­es­sary.

The MOE stressed, “All oth­er sec­ondary school stu­dents are not to re­port phys­i­cal­ly for school.”

Re­gard­ing stu­dents at the pri­ma­ry and ear­ly child­hood lev­els, the MOE ad­vised, “Stu­dents will not re­turn to their phys­i­cal class­rooms at the start of Term III on April 12th, 2021.”

In­stead, “All class­es should be held vir­tu­al­ly and stu­dents who re­quire pack­ages shall uti­lize their usu­al method of col­lec­tion with all safe­ty pro­to­cols ob­served.”

For the gen­er­al op­er­a­tions at schools, the MOE called for all en­try pro­to­cols to be en­forced.

Mean­while, med­ical clear­ance is re­quired for any staff or stu­dents to re-en­ter the school pop­u­la­tion af­ter be­ing sus­pect­ed/con­firmed to have con­tract­ed COVID-19; and med­ical clear­ance is al­so re­quired for staff or stu­dents to en­ter the school pop­u­la­tion if an­oth­er med­ical con­di­tion (e.g. al­ler­gies) is caus­ing the dis­play of flu-like symp­toms which would re­sult in be­ing barred from en­try to the school com­pound.