Education chief: All kids back in school in 2-3 weeks if virus rates stay steady

The director-general of the Education Ministry said Saturday that grades four through six could return to school in another week and all students within three weeks, if Sunday’s reopening of kindergartens is successful and there is no increase in infection rates.

“We are gradually moving step by step. This week, elementary schools, 11th and 12th grade, [classes for] special education and at-risk youth were opened. We will open the kindergartens and after school programs this week. And immediately, if there is no glitch, we will move on to grades four through 10, and then look at the situation for the summer vacation,” Shmuel Abuav told Channel 13 news.

Grades 1-3 and 11-12 returned to school this week with smaller classes and strict health procedures.

Schools will likely have to rotate attendance as more grades resume classes, subject to government approval, as they do not have enough classroom space for all students to maintain social distancing at the same time.

However, the assumption within the ministry is that the education system will be fully reopened within two to three weeks, so long as infection rates do not dramatically increase.

The comments echoed those of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this week, who said he expects all students will return to classes by the end of the month, while universities and colleges are set to reopen on June 14.

Hundreds of thousands of children aged 3-6 were set to return to kindergartens, supervised daycares and private facilities on Sunday after nearly two months at home amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The children will attend in groups of no more than 18 and the majority will attend only three days a week so that the limits can be maintained, with the set days rotated on a weekly basis on the grounds that many parents don’t work on Fridays.

The groups of 18 will in turn be divided into groups of no more than nine children, who will be strictly separated within the kindergarten. The Education Ministry has said that attendance is not compulsory.

However, some private daycares have decided to postpone opening their gates due to what they see as Health Ministry guidelines that are too difficult to implement. In addition, parents of some children at government-supervised daycares protested Saturday because their children are not allowed to attend due to class sizes being limited to 17.

In addition, the situation over Lag B’Omer remained unresolved, with all public education institutions set to shut their doors on Tuesday for the festival, some of them just two days after they reopened. The situation caused a row between parents — the majority of whom do not receive a vacation day for Lag B’Omer — kindergarten staff and the teachers unions after the latter initially suggested daycares could voluntarily remain open but then backtracked.

Some municipalities, including Jerusalem, Givatayim, Herzliya and Ra’anana, have said that kindergartens under their jurisdiction would remain open and that the salaries of anyone working would be covered by city hall, Channel 13 news reported.

An agreement was reached Friday between the Treasury, local councils and the Education Ministry that would allow for the reopening of afterschool care centers for kindergarten children and 1st and 2nd graders. With kindergartens finishing by 2 p.m., and schools at 1 p.m., pressure mounted to reopen the afterschool centers too as getting small children into fulltime daycare is seen as key to helping parents return to work as the lockdown restrictions ease.

The agreement reached would see afternoon programs reopen in a similar format as the kindergartens. Parents would only pay for the days that their children were in the centers and the Finance Ministry would pay the shortfall in operating costs.

Local councils, which run the centers, now have the green light to get them ready and inform parents when they will open, most likely during next week.

Schools were among the first institutions to shut down in mid-March, a move that was quickly followed by stricter measures that brought the economy to a virtual standstill and forced many to remain at home as the country sought to prevent a large outbreak of COVID-19.