KEVON FELMINE

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

While Gov­ern­ment pro­pos­es to of­fer face-to-face class­es for vac­ci­nat­ed sec­ondary school stu­dents, on­ly a third of the el­i­gi­ble stu­dent pop­u­la­tion has tak­en the vac­cine.

In re­veal­ing that ap­prox­i­mate­ly 31,000 stu­dents be­tween 12-18 had so far tak­en the Pfiz­er-BioN­Tech vac­cines ap­proved for the school-age pop­u­la­tion, Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly said it was not where the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion wants to be at this time.

Gads­by-Dol­ly was speak­ing on the Morn­ing Pan­chay­at on Aakash Vani 106.5 FM yes­ter­day. She said learn­ing loss was a glob­al fea­ture of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic be­cause stu­dents were not in school. Re­gion­al­ly, ed­u­ca­tion bod­ies coun­tered this by amend­ing ex­am­i­na­tion for­mats and de­lay­ing tests. 

With a thrust to get stu­dents back in the phys­i­cal class, Gads­by-Dol­ly said the min­istry wants to pro­tect stu­dents to the point that if they be­come ex­posed to COVID-19 in the school set­ting, they do not get sick and take it home. While she un­der­stands vac­ci­na­tion is a scary thought for some peo­ple, she said she wants par­ents to look at the sci­ence, which would show that the best pro­tec­tion for their chil­dren is vac­ci­na­tion.

“My chil­dren have their sec­ond dos­es to­day (yes­ter­day), so as soon as we are fin­ished speak­ing here, I am go­ing to get my chil­dren down to the Pad­dock for their sec­ond dos­es. That is where we are. It is just about, maybe, one-third of the el­i­gi­ble pop­u­la­tion, based on our school pop­u­la­tion for the ages 12-18. That is not where we had hoped to be, but that is where we are at this point,” Gads­by-Dol­ly said.

The min­istry wants forms four, five and six stu­dents back in the class­room to bet­ter pre­pare them for the up­com­ing Caribbean Sec­ondary Ed­u­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Ad­vanced Pro­fi­cien­cy Ex­am­i­na­tion (CAPE). Gads­by-Dol­ly said the min­istry held four meet­ings with stake­hold­ers, in­clud­ing con­sul­ta­tion with the T&T Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA).

She said last Feb­ru­ary, the min­istry al­lowed the same co­hort of stu­dents back to school to com­plete the prac­ti­cal as­sess­ments. She stressed that stu­dents need­ed to re­turn to com­plete prac­ti­cal as­pects for sci­ences, per­form­ing arts and the Caribbean Vo­ca­tion­al Qual­i­fi­ca­tion.

The Feb­ru­ary class­es al­so pro­vid­ed teach­ers with the ex­pe­ri­ence of han­dling both on­line and face to face class­es.

“In this case, it might be dif­fer­ent be­cause if you have stu­dents from those class­es who are un­vac­ci­nat­ed, then a teacher may have half of a class out for teach­ing and learn­ing and half the class not out. So it is go­ing to be a lit­tle bit of a dif­fer­ent di­men­sion, but it is not some­thing that there is no ex­pe­ri­ence at all with, in the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem, at this point.”

She said there will be fur­ther dis­cus­sion to de­ter­mine how else the min­istry can sup­port. There is al­so the is­sue of sup­ply­ing teach­ers with de­vices to help them cope with the new learn­ing mod­el. She said there are projects for pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools to in­crease WIFI cov­er­age to al­low teach­ers to work in school to pro­vide on­line learn­ing.