Renewal of studies in the lower grades: the fast route versus the safer and more expensive route • Will the first and second grades be split into capsules?
• Ministers will decide
Will they return to study in capsules?
Photography:
Oren Ben Hakon
The fast way or the safe way: the
confrontation over the capsules.
The Corona Cabinet is expected to discuss this week the plan to exit the quarantine, including the return of the education system to the Corona routine and the resumption of frontal studies.
After endless reports, recommendations, and expert advice, ministers will have to decide how the education system will return to classroom learning. Quarantine In such a case, the system is ready to return immediately, as soon as the quarantine ends, and the move does not involve additional expenses from the state coffers.
Photo: newsenders, Shmuel Buharis
In contrast, there is a safer option in the eyes of experts: to open the first and second grades into capsules, in small groups.
Such an outline would require long days of preparation, and a huge budget that could reach billions of shekels.
According to estimates, the Ministry of Health will not request a split in the kindergartens, but a split in the first and second grades has not been dropped.
These are about 15,000 classes, in the two age groups that need to be split in two;
Recruit teachers, staff and more.
It should be noted that all the advisory teams, including the National Information and Knowledge Center for the Corona Campaign as well as the National Counseling Team, recommended returning nurseries, kindergartens and grades 1-3 to schools in small groups (capsules of up to 18 students).
According to the National Information and Knowledge Center, only then can the return of fourth-sixth grades be considered.
At the bottom of the chain are middle school students, for whom the recommendation is to examine their return only when there is a stable and low morbidity trend in the country.
As for high schools, it is estimated that it will take weeks and even months for them to return to classroom learning.
Two-tone sign
Morbidity data in the education system show that 50% of sick students (out of about 12,000 sick students) are concentrated in 512 schools, which constitutes less than 10% of all schools in Israel (5,200).
These are 372 schools in the ultra-Orthodox sector, 113 schools in the general sector and another 27 schools in the non-Jewish sector.
For this reason, Education Minister Yoav Galant is interested in seeing the education system return to its corona routine as before the closure, without capsules in kindergartens and grades 1-2, and with capsules in grades 3-4.
However, in the end the members of the Corona Cabinet, of which Minister Galant is not a member, are likely to prevail.
The Ministry of Education has been collecting data for several weeks and wants to open or close schools based on this information alone.
The Minister of Education's office is talking about a model of a "two-color sign" - red and green, so that each school will be closed or opened according to its morbidity data.
Currently, there are about 4,700 schools that have a green sign to open, certainly if only the lower grades are returned, then the morbidity is particularly low.
The Ministry of Education is expected to present at this week's discussion several alternatives, including those mentioned, and it is the government that will decide.
The return of the upper classes, as mentioned, seems far away at the moment, and there are estimates that it will take many weeks and even months for them to return to regular activity.
It should be noted that among the options presented above there are also some intermediate options, such as a return to routine in the outline introduced after the first closure, so go back to kindergarten learning in a rotation that left parents at home half the time.
In this setting, all first- and third-graders returned to school in small groups, and fourth-graders and up stayed to study from home, in online learning.