– Minister Manickchand

THE Ministry of Education (MoE) is currently putting together a plan to guide the moving forward of the physical reopening of schools, which will be based on individualised plans, and it will be up to the schools to decide whether they will reopen fully or whether it would do a rotation system for the students.
With students currently out on their August vacation, schools are scheduled to reopen to virtual learning from September 6; however, the ministry has not yet announced definitely on the physical reopening of schools for face-to-face learning.
Speaking with the Guyana Chronicle on Thursday, Education Minister, Priya Manickchand reaffirmed that the ministry is moving ahead with the physical reopening of public schools but is still in the process of examining what that reopening will look like.

“Schools are going to reopen because COVID is going nowhere. We are opening,” Minister Manickchand said.
The ministry is gathering data and is expected to make an official announcement shortly.
“What reopening means might not be what we are accustomed to. It will look different for different schools in different regions, and even for different villages,” Manickchand explained. She further added: “We’re trying to individualise it. For example, if a school has eight children but might be built to accommodate 40, then everyone can go back, but where a school might have 1,000 children but is built to accommodate 600 then we can’t reopen [fully] there, we would have to do a rotation. If for example and entire village is vaccinated — all the parents, all the teachers, and the village is under lockdown then we would not have a problem with everyone coming back out.”

The minister noted that the ministry is also looking at how to deal with assessing students and mitigating learning loss that would have been caused by the physical closure of schools for over one year now.
“On the issue of learning loss we have consolidated all of our curriculum [and] we have a plan,” Manickchand said.
Schools in Guyana have largely remained physically closed since March 2020 as part of measures implemented to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Schools officially reopened virtually in September 2020.
In November 2020, schools were partially reopened physically for Grades 10, 11 and 12 students to help them prepare for their Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) examinations.

In May of this year, Minister Manickchand had first announced, in a video address, that the ministry was considering the physical reopening of school this September.
The minister had noted that the decision was taken based on the fact that though there has been no cure for the deadly COVID-19 virus, the vaccines have proven to be effective enough to guard against serious symptoms and, more importantly, death.
Guyana is currently engaged in a robust vaccination campaign and thus far, over half of the country’s adult population has received one dose of the vaccines being administered.

Guyana is also set to procure a supply of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine which has been approved for use by children from 12 years old and other.
This will be done with the consent of parents and the ministry has begun issuing consent forms over the past few weeks, with favourable responses.
Minister Manickchand noted that the ministry is also working along with private schools to make the vaccine available to those students as well.
“For the purposes of vaccines, we treated private schools the same way we have treated the public schools — they have forms. Then we will go to them and vaccinate them too if that’s what they want,” she explained.