NGO cautions govt over schools reopening

The Executive Director of Child Rights International (CRI), Mr Bright Appiah, has called on the government to hasten slowly in its decision to reopen schools on a mass level.

He said although CRI was not entirely against the reopening of schools, it would be necessary to undertake the process gradually, beginning with final-year students.

“Preferably, the government must adopt a gradual process approach where final-year students due for exams should first be allowed to resume classes as a test case for broader school reopening,” Mr Appiah said.

He said it would be beneficial to begin the school reopening process with final-year students at the junior and senior high school levels.

"CRI believes that the government should first allow those who are due for exams to go back to school, with full adherence to the protocols of social distancing and any other precautionary measures against coronavirus (COVID-19)," he said in the statement.

Students

He said students who were due for their turn on the double-track system could then be allowed to resume school since they had a backlog of academic work to catch up with.

In the meantime, Mr Appiah said, all nursery and kindergarten schools should remain closed indefinitely while the government focused on developing more online programmes for parents to take up that role.

"Corporate institutions must make it a deliberate policy for more parents to spend time with their children. More so, the government should engage the social workers to periodically visit homes," he said in a statement copied to the Daily Graphic.

Broader picture

These measures, Mr Appiah said, would give the government the enabling environment to have a broader picture of how reopening school on the mass level would be.

"By so doing, the government would have an idea about how to handle and assess the impact of reopening schools on the mass level. This is the only way to halt any decision that might spell doom for the country's educational sector," he said

Mr Appiah said the state must bear in mind that any wrong approach could spell doom for children and Ghana's attempt to contain the coronavirus disease.

He said there must be a collaboration between the Ghana Health Service and schools in terms of relevant protocols towards rolling out measures to reopen schools.