Ministry promises safe environment for nursery schools’ reopening

ASSISTANT CHIEF EDUCATION OFFICER (ACEO) WITH RESPONSIBILITY FOR
NURSERY LEARNING, MS. SAMANTHA WILLIAMS, IS CONFIDENT that nursery
students will return to school in a safe, protective and conducive environment when the doors are
reopened on September 6.
Williams said only 41 of the nations 348 nursery schools will have face-to-face learning five
days per week, while the other 341 will do so “on a rotation system”.
First and Second year nursery school students will attend school on different days during the
week. Therefore, she advised parents to check with the children’s schools for all relevant details.
She said the ministry of education will also soon publish a listing of all 348 nursery schools
identifying those operating fulltime, that is, 5-days-per-week, and those utilising the rotation
system.
Schools were forced to close in March 2020 following the discovery of the deadly coronavirus in
Guyana when an overseas-based national was diagnosed post mortem with the disease at the
Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC).
ACEO Williams explained that the prolonged stay at home and the confinement have impacted
negatively on the physical and mental health of the nation’s children. She explained as a
consequence, children sometimes become less active; develop irregular sleep patterns and
develop a taste for unhealthy foods.
Children’s ability to socialise is also harmed, Williams counselled.
She said students will enjoy no less than two hours of learning a day, or no less than four hours
of contact learning per week.
“For all nursery schools the contact time with teachers and learners should not be less than two
hours per day or four hours per week.  We recognise at the nursery level that it is important for

us to partner with parents as we continue the learning journey for all of our children, and so it is
on this premise that we have decided to allow our children to be at school for no less than four
hours per week.”
“We believe that the four-hour instruction, along with the parental support, will be adequate to
help our children to acquire those basic literacy, numeracy and life skills. The teacher-to-pupil
ratio should not exceed one teacher to five learners and this is to ensure that we can supervise our
children as we provide those necessary instructions that is needed,” the ACEO explained.
She said all nursery school students will receive a home-based package from their school. This is
to help reduce physical contacts among the children.
“The instructional programme will be heavily focused on building literacy, numeracy skills and
on teaching values and family life education. All nursery aged children will receive a home
based early package provided by the Ministry of Education. This package will contain all the
relevant resources that are needed for parents and teachers to be able to perform that quality
education for our children.  The home-based package will contain crayons, pencils, building
blocks, wooden puzzles, flash cards, letter cards, numeral cards and word cards, play dough,
exercise and activity books among other things” Willliams noted.
She continued: “This package is necessary because we know that we are operating under strict
COVID 19 measures and we are trying to avoid, at all cost, sharing of resources, so we are
ensuring that our child at the nursery level will have an individualized learning package that he
or she will use.”
There will be adequate staff ACEO Williams assured.
“When schools operationalised their individual plans for re-opening, they took into consideration
the number of teachers that are available to them. The ratio that we would have given…also took
into consideration the available space that they have,” she said in response to a query from
www.aroundtheregions.com

“Every year at the beginning of the academic year the Ministry of Education and the Teaching
Service Commission (TSC) would engage in what we call a staff rationalisation. We look to see
how many teachers would have left the system; whether they would have resigned or they would
have retired for whatever reasons and we would go through a process to find those junior
vacancies, as we would call them. We would have gone through that process. We have submitted
to the Teaching Service Commission the junior vacancies that exist in the various Regions, so
it’s likely that those positions will be filled where we do have vacancies,” Williams explained.