Pre-primary students’ very first day at school today

Secondary schools are set to resume full-fledged in-person classes today – two years after the Covid-19-induced closures, online classes and limited scale operations.

Pre-primary classes at primary schools and kindergartens will also resume today, with the attendance of many first-time students.

Authorities of many secondary schools, however, said it will be challenging to keep students three feet apart in classrooms, as the number of students compared to classrooms is too big.

Education Minister Dipu Moni on Saturday announced the resumption of in-person classes on all subjects in secondary and higher secondary schools from March 15.

"From tomorrow [today], all secondary schools and colleges will start classes in full-swing like they did prior to the pandemic," Prof Nehal Ahmed, director general of the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education, told The Daily Star yesterday.

He said they are starting in-person classes as 98 percent of the students from classes six to 12 have received the first shot of Covid-19 vaccines, while about 86 percent of them received the second. Another reason, he added, for schools to start classes was the declining Covid-19 positivity rate.

There are 1.28 crore students in classes six to 12 in around 20,850 schools.

On March 17, 2020, all educational institutions were shut down due to the pandemic. They reopened partially on September 12 last year, after one of the longest school closures – 543 days – in the world.

The government again shut down schools and colleges from January 21 for two weeks after a sharp rise in the virus's transmission rate. The closure was later extended till February 21.

Classes resumed partially at secondary on February 22, and primary school classes on March 2.

With the resumption of pre-primary classes today, students who had enrolled in schools in 2021 and this year will experience in-person classes for the first time.

Contacted, Zakir Hossen, minister for primary and mass education, yesterday said that a decision regarding full-fledged classes for all grades in primary schools will be taken soon.

ANM Shamsul Alam Khan, principal of Willes Little Flower School and College, and Abu Sayeed Bhuiyan, headmaster of Government Laboratory High School, said they will face challenges to ensure social distancing among students as the number of classrooms is smaller than that of students.

"With a distance of three feet among students, we can accommodate only 36 of them in each classroom, while have around 8,500 students overall…," Shamsul said.

Both of them said wearing masks at schools will remain mandatory and all students will need to wash their hands while entering campus while maintaining social distancing.

Asked, Nehal said schools can take a day or two to prepare their routines, if needed, and split each class into batches to ensure social distancing inside classrooms.