LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Concerns about reopening of schools

Editor,

I am a stay at home mother of six, four of whom are attending secondary school. I have been looking for part-time work for the last seven months. I just signed up for a part-time course which starts in September. It is in my interest to get my kids back to school and a normal routine. I also strongly agree that the best learning environment for children is a school-based setting.

Why am I concerned? When the government announced, ‘We will fully open the schools in September no matter what’, it alarmed me.

They want to lump our children back into school regardless of their safety and health and that of their grandparents.

Shouldn’t we have heard, ‘we will ensure all relevant precautions and systems are in place to protect our children before they return to school’?

Cast your minds back to February and March: secondary schools were the first places the government shut down. Covid-19 had been contracted while the students were on skiing trips. The virus quickly spread around the schools and to their families, contrary to the assertion that children are not spreaders of Covid-19.

Now the government thinks it’s okay to fully open our schools. Let’s list the changes they have made.

1. Create pods.

This is an excuse to lump six kids together and not social distance them. If we were told in the morning that we could go into the supermarket in groups with five random people, we would question it and say it doesn’t make sense, and yet we don’t question it for our children.

The students in these pods will more than likely have siblings in other pods. When they go to play in the yard, are they going to stay in their pods? If one of them contracts Covid-19, it will spread quickly.

2. Reorganise the furniture so that the pods and not the children are one metre away from each other. This will, by the way, facilitate packing 30 children into one room.

3. Employ 1080 new secondary teachers; this is broken down to two teachers per school. When it comes to making class sizes smaller for an entire school, it will make little or no difference. This is the only plan I have seen for secondary school so far.

4. Hand washing.

In my opinion little or no effort has been made to keep our children and ultimately their grandparents safe.

I would have thought mass testing of all students would have been the first thing that was proposed. After all that’s the treatment footballers got before they went back, but maybe our children and their grandparents are not that important.

Where are the plans for special needs and vulnerable children?

One-metre social distancing is the minimum I would have expected, not absolutely no social distancing between groups of six.

The government are in a mad rush to get our children back to school to facilitate their parents going back to work. I get that, but as usual no thought or effort has gone into this and I can only imagine at what cost.

Is this some kind of experiment? Am I alone in my thoughts or are others bewildered by the audacity of our leaders to cast our children into the unknown with little or no care?

Yours,

Linda Raeside,

Walshestown, Mullingar.