Nigeria’s Ministry of Education has submitted proposed guidelines for the reopening of schools to the National Assembly.
The Minister of State for Education, Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba, presented the guidelines to the Senate Committee on Basic and Secondary Education on Tuesday during a meeting with the committee.
The documents, according to the minister, contain suggestions on how to move the education forward in spite of the pandemic. Recall that the Nigerian government shut all schools in March to curb the spread of COVID-19 pandemic.
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He said the lawmakers are expected to criticise and make inputs as stakeholders, adding, “We don’t want to make the contents of the document known at this time so that some people will not take our proposed guidelines for school reopening.
“Even if the Senate has not called us, we would have come to you to discuss with you because we have already discussed with the House of Representatives.”
Vice-Chairperson of the Committee, Akon Eyakenyi, who presided over the meeting, expressed concerns over the disruption of the academic calendar, especially in public schools where there were no visible arrangement to teach pupils and students at home as being done in some private schools.
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Eyakenyi said, “Even when the students in the cities have access to education programmes on radio and television, what of those in the villages? What do we do so that we don’t shut them out?”
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He said if the government could give guidelines for the reopening of churches and mosques, stakeholders in the education sector should also be allowed to hold a meeting with the government to agree on guidelines for school reopening.
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“We can design a plan that would ensure that not all the students resume at the same time. We could probably start with the exit classes. We could have the number of students that would go to school for both morning and afternoon sessions. We have to be innovative in our approach to save our educational sector in this country because nobody knows how long the virus will be with us.”
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