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Regional administrations to get discretion on school reopening
Nadiem said that regional administrations and regional religious affairs offices, school administrations including parents’ committees, as well as the parents themselves must agree before a school could begin face-to-face teaching.
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Students listen to their teacher at Muhammadiyah vocational school in Makassar, South Sulawesi on Nov. 17. The school has reopened for offline teaching while adhering to health protocols including physical distancing. (Antara/epost-robot)
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n the next month or two the government will give the power to local administrations, school administrations and parents to decide whether their schools should reopen for in-classroom teaching, taking into consideration the risks of COVID-19 transmission.
“The school reopening can be done immediately or in stages according to each region’s capability and the decision of their regional heads. The schools wanting to reopen must fulfill the checklist [requirements] for face-to-face teaching and health protocols,” Education and Culture Minister Nadiem Makarim said at an online press conference on Friday.
The policy is a major departure from the previous school reopening policy set out in June. Previously, only schools in green or yellow zones were allowed to conduct face-to-face teaching. The new policy allows schools in red zones to reopen.
Green zones are areas without active COVID-19 cases while yellow zones mean low-risk areas with controlled active cases and a red zone is an area with several active cases. The zoning is decided by the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB).
Nadiem said that the central government had received requests for school reopening from regional administrations, which argued that some of their administrative areas were safe enough for face-to-face teaching and were finding it difficult to conduct online learning.
He said there were several considerations on the negative impacts of online learning. Some of the impacts include students dropping out for economic reasons, decreasing early age school (PAUD) attendance rates, children being stressed from a lack of interaction with peers, as well as increasing rates of domestic violence.
Nadiem said that regional administrations and regional religious affairs offices, school administrations including parents’ committees, as well as the parents themselves must agree before a school could begin face-to-face teaching.
