AS some schools are set to re-open their doors for face-to-face learning on September 6, 2021, the Ministry of Education, based on advice from the Ministry of Health, is expecting adolescent students to be vaccinated to re-enter the classrooms.

“We could do only what we were advised by the Ministry of Health and at this point they are uncomfortable with social gathering or any gathering of unvaccinated persons,” Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand said at a press conference on Friday.

The vaccination campaign for adolescents, persons between the ages of 12 to 18, began on Thursday as Guyana received 146,250 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine which has been earmarked for persons of that age range.

“Our mandate at education is not to just open secondary schools, it is to open, according to the vaccination plan, how that’s rolled out,” Manickchand said as she explained that a school setting is a social gathering and she was of the impression that the Health Ministry was “uncomfortable” opening secondary school doors without rolling out the adolescent vaccination campaign.

“Philosophically, we believe classroom doors should never be locked to any child who wants to enter a classroom; that philosophy is a foundation on which we work, but all our foundations have been seriously shaken by this virus,” the Education Minister said.

“We expect that the children who will go into schools will access this vaccine and get it,” she added, highlighting that if situations arise where students are desirous of entering the classrooms without the vaccine, those situations will be assessed on what is “healthy”.

Manickchand said that the government has acquired enough vaccines for all the students under 18 in Guyana to be protected against the deadly COVID-19 virus before they re-enter the classrooms.
“And we hope that they will access those vaccines because we will go school to school and community to community to deliver, not we, the Ministry of Health, to administer the vaccines, give the shots to the children,” she said.

“While our philosophy is to open doors for anyone who is to come in, it will have to be tempered by how safe that is given the nature of this virus,” she added.

Assistant Chief Education Officer (Secondary), June-Ann Gonsalves, during the press conference disclosed that seven of the 133 secondary schools in Guyana will be reopened for every grade level while the remaining 126 will operate on a rotational basis, with online-learning being retained.

Chief Education Officer (CEO), Dr. Marcel Hutson, disclosed that 44 primary schools across Guyana will be reopened fully while 413 will be operating on a rotational basis. Given that Grade Six pupils are preparing to do their National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA), they will return fully.

Assistant Chief Education Officer (Nursery), Samantha Williams highlighted that some 41 of the 348 nursery schools across Guyana will fully reopen for face-to-face classes while the remainder will operate on a rotational basis.