By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Thousands of children across Sierra Leone will return to school today for the first time in three months, after the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic forced the early closure of schools and delayed their reopening for the second term of the academic year.
Those who have been instructed to return to school are pupils in Class 6, JSS III, and SSS III, all of whom will be preparing to write different public examinations in the coming weeks.
The Sierra Leone Law School is also reopening today, becoming the only tertiary institution to reopen for in person lectures, since March 31st, 2020, when the country recorded its first COVID-19 case.
The announcement for the reopening of schools was made on the 11th of June by the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education (MBSSE).
The ministry stated that pupils in Class 6 will be writing the National Primary School Examinations (NPSE) at the end of July, which is just four weeks away from today.
Children in Junior Secondary School level 3 will write the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in September, immediately after the completion of the West Africa Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE) which will take place starting August 4 for pupils in SSS 3. The WASSCE students therefore have four weeks to prepare for their exams.
Schools have been preparing to welcome pupils back after the long break.
But preparations have not been smooth. Florence Kuyembeh, Acting Principal for the Freetown Secondary School for Girls, a JSS level school, told Politico on Monday that they have had to overhaul the entire timetable.
“We are doing the timetable; we use to have eight periods. You know we have an extension now, so kids will be here till 2pm,” she said.
Kuyembeh said the school has 300 JSS 3 pupils, noting that this will mean they will have to be arranged into smaller numbers for classes to make sure social distancing is in maintained.
The guideline of the Education ministry states that there shouldn’t be more than 25 pupils in one class.
The distribution of pupils into smaller numbers per class will mean the JSS 3 pupils will need more teachers. Kuyembeh said a staff meeting has already been called and even teachers that are not usually teaching JSS 3 classes have been called in to help.
Like many other school authorities, Kuyembeh is concerned about the time the kids have already lost and she is wondering whether eight weeks will be enough to prepare them for the BECE exams.
“We have to revise what we had taught them, before introducing them to other topics. We cannot asses them on what they did during the two months. As a school, we know passing the BECE needs more work, so we will try our best. If we see that after the first three weeks we need to have some remedial classes, we will have them,” Kuyembeh said.
The government has laid a lot of emphasis on hygiene, which includes frequent hand washing. Kuyembeh said their greatest concern is water. Her school, she said, has two tanks which are full for now. She said she is worried about water supply after they will have exhausted the current quantity.
Ibrahim Sheriff, Communication Specialist at the Ministry of Basic Education, told Politico that they were in talks with the Sierra Leone Water Company (SALWACO) and Guma Valley Water Company (GVWC) to supply water to all schools across the country in time for the reopening of schools.
When asked if the supply from Guma and SALWACO will continue, he said: “We are going to ensure that there is constant water supply on all campuses at all times.”
Last weekend, government ferried children who had gone for holiday to different parts of the country back to where they attend school.
But amidst the preparation, schools in some of the most deprived communities in the country seem to have been forgotten.
On Monday Politico visited a Primary school in the country’s biggest slum, Kroo Bay.
We Yone Primary School, Kroo Bay was established in 2014. When school reopens today, it will be expecting 34 children who are in Class 6. Head Teacher of the school, Osman Kamara, said through all this preparation, his school has been forgotten.
“No one from government have reached out to us or visited us for anything. We don’t even have Veronica bucket for the kids to wash their hands,” he said.
Even before COVID-19, Kamara said his school has largely been left to fend for itself. But COVID-19 is not Kamara's only worry; he said the reopening of schools couldn’t have come at a worse time for the school.
The school is a makeshift corrugated iron sheets structure, with barely enough furniture for all the kids.
“Every year during the rains, our school is flooded. The water gets as high as knee level. And sometimes it takes the kids days to return to school.
This has been the situation for the last five years,” Kamara said.
In response to Kamara’s concern, Sheriff said support was still been rolled out and promised that it would meet every school. Part of that support is providing food for children in primary schools, he said.
“For primary schools, we are going to distribute dry food rations to all the NPSE pupils, so they can take it home for their parents to cook for them, so they will have energy to come back to school the next day,” Sheriff explained.
On the specific logistical concerns, the Education ministry spokesman said the Director of the Inspectorate had assured the ministry that everything would go as planned.
Apart from the academic and logistical aspect of preparations, school authorities also have to learn on what to do if they have a situation where they will need to isolate anyone in their school.
Sheriff said teachers are currently been trained on how to administer psychosocial support for the children in extreme circumstances.
In a place like Kenema, their situation has been unique. Three schools were used as quarantine centers by the District COVID-19 Emergency Response Center.
Chairman of the Conference of Principals in the district, Septimus Vandy, told Politico that in preparation for reopening they demanded that those schools be disinfected before classes resume.
He said this has been done and a number of other measures put in place ahead of today.
“We have been doing a lot of cleaning in our schools. We are really ready for the reopening. We have spoken to our teachers and we are determined to teach and make sure the children do well in school,” Vandy said.
However, Vandy noted that they expected the government to have supplied facemasks for pupils and teachers by now.
The FSSG Principal and the Head Teacher of We Yone Primary school raised the same concern.
Sierra Leone has recorded huge success in COVID-19 recoveries, with over 900 oot of over 1,400 cases. The reopening of schools will come as a stiff test on how government will manage to prevent any outbreak of the virus in schools.
Copyright © 2020 Politico Online
