Students and teachers have settled in well
– AG Nandlall visits East Coast schools
Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Hon. Mohabir Anil Nandlall today visited five East Coast Demerara schools, where he interacted with senior students and teachers on their first day back, after an eight-month hiatus due to COVID-19.
At each school, the Minister reinforced the need for students and staff to obey the preventative COVID-19 measures for their safety. He said the decision to reopen schools was carefully considered, as the country needed to ensure that its students were well prepared for their 2021 exams.
“A lot of thinking, a lot of analysis and careful consideration was put into that decision; your welfare, your health, the teachers’ health, the importance of you to be an afforded an opportunity to be back in a classroom to prepare for your exams, both the school-based assessments as well as the examinations themselves, were all factors that were carefully considered,” he said.
The AG said children are Guyana’s most valuable asset and the country’s future leaders and workforce.
“That is why we have to take care of you, but most importantly; you have to take care of yourselves so that six years from now you are at university, you are at teachers training college, or you are studying or working somewhere to make a better future for yourself as well as, hopefully, for our country,” the AG said.
The Attorney General observed that students and staff have settled in well and expressed the hope that they would obey the preventative guidelines in and out of school.
Meanwhile, many preparations were made to ensure teachers and students remain safe when they returned to face-to-face learning interaction.
“We had to pack. We had to ensure that the children are six feet apart, arrange everything, and then we had to have a care package delivered, which we did that this morning, so we are able to get that process up and running,” Deputy Head Master of the Annandale Secondary, Mr. Manniram Jherry told DPI.
Student, Miss Maria Persaud of Bladen Hall Multilateral spoke with DPI about her first day back at school. “Coming back to school is a risk; I’m scared, everyone is scared, but we all have to accomplish what we left off, and that is from March – we didn’t do quite much. But we still come back to finish off, just to finish off and get it over with,” she said.
Miss Devi Singh of La Bonne Intention Secondary School appreciates the Ministry’s care package.
“It’s nice that they actually helped us with these packages also it’s a very good help. It’s really great because sometimes even using the Zoom class, face-to-face conversation is actually more, it means a lot more, more understanding, even though in the Zoom class they might explain more to you; I still rather the face-to-face,” she explained. The Attorney General also visited Golden Grove Secondary and the Hope Secondary schools.