Clarendon principals welcome reopening of schools
Published:Tuesday | November 3, 2020 | 12:14 AMCecelia Campbell-Livingston/Gleaner Writer
The headmasters of Morgan’s Forest Primary and Infant and Alston High School, two Clarendon schools selected as part of a two-week pilot to resume face-to-face classes, are grateful for being selected.
“Blessed and highly favoured” is how Romeo Cross summed up Morgan Forest Primary’s inclusion after being officially informed on Sunday.
“We are ready. We have been preparing ourselves long before because we need to keep things in order as we didn’t know when the Government would make the decision,” he told The Gleaner.
Cross said that the school is now fine-tuning arrangements to open the doors next week.
With a student population of 147 students, Cross said that his students are from the community and walk to school. He believes the parents would also be happy for the resumption of face-to-face classes.
“The students had [Internet] connectivity issues and parents were crying for the school to be reopened,” he said, adding that he will be meeting with parents on Wednesday to discuss the pilot.
Alston High Principal Adrian Sinclair said his institution has been prepared, sanitising the grounds and installing hand sanitiser dispensers.
“We were visited by public health inspector and we were compliant. What we did is to continue to maintain all of those COVID-19 protocols in anticipation that one day we would be called upon to have face-to-face class,” Sinclair told The Gleaner.
Sharing devices
Alston High, which has a student population of 540 with 70 per cent being boys, is populated by mainly rural students with virtual Internet access and many lacking devices to access online resources.
“Some households have the one device and they have three children ... [who] have to access their learning material from the one device,” Sinclair said, pointing out that two-thirds of the school population are enrolled on the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH).
Like Morgan’s Forest, Sinclair said although he hasn’t officially spoken to parents on the reopening plans, he is confident that they will welcome it.
“Some of them will look forward to that because they complained that they don’t have Internet and they don’t have any devices, so I believe that most of them would welcome the fact that the students will be in class,” he said.
Seventeen schools across the island are participating in the pilot.