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Government meeting designs blueprint for schools to reopen

Husain Haider / Khmer Times Share:
A primary school-aged boy at a public school in Battambang province. The government is working on re-opening schools. KT/Husain Haider

Cambodia’s education sector met for a high-level discussion with the government to forge a path forward for the re-opening of schools.

The pandemic forced schools to go online in March 2020. They reopened in September that year before closing again in November.

Schools began operating under a hybrid model in January but were forced to temporarily suspend operations once more following the Feb 20 Covid event when infected foreigners bribed their way out of quarantine in Phnom Penh and spread the disease.

The closures have affected 3.21 million students and more than 93,000 teachers across the Kingdom, according to United Nations data.

It remains unclear what the timeline for reopening is, but its form is beginning to take shape following the meeting.

“We agreed that schools should open but the question remains how to do it,” educationist Dr Mengly Quach said, following a meeting with the Education Technical Working Group dubbed “Group 11” that is charged with handling the pandemic and its implications in the private sector.

The meeting was said to have lasted two hours and was chaired by Minister of Education, Youth and Sport, Hang Chuon Naron.

The working group posed several requests ahead of the reopening.

These include that social security benefits and withholding taxes be delayed, the National Bank of Cambodia reduce interest rates to ease lending in the education sector, increasing internet speeds, that classes be quarantined rather than entire schools if an outbreak occurs and offering  more vaccines to all school teachers and staff, as well as students, as soon as possible.

“Most likely it will be a hybrid system but we have not yet decided what that will look like. Last time [January], we had a half-and-half hybrid system. Students were rotated and spent half their time in-class and half of their time online. This time it will be either one-third or one-fourth,” Quach, who is a vice co-chair of the Education Technical Working Group, told Khmer Times.

Already, most teachers in the capital have been vaccinated, according to Quach, who was awarded the honorific Okhna title in 2018 for his services to the Kingdom.

“It is better to have schools open than not. If you have classes open, we will be affected. If they remain closed, we will still be affected, but at least students will continue to learn and the impact on their mental and physical health will be lessened,” he said.

Quach is the founder of the Mengly J. Quach Education Plc, an umbrella for the Aii Language Centers (Aii) and American Intercon Schools (AIS). Collectively, they have more than 50,000 alumni and, currently, they have more than 15,000 students. He said that student enrollments had dropped substantially during the pandemic, with parents of preschool and kindergarten-aged children pulling their children out of classes the most.

“These are formative years for children and it is clear online education is not the best tool for learning, particularly for children at the early stages of development. Moreover, you can imagine that not every parent has access to television, much less a smartphone or computer, especially in rural areas, making the need for school re-openings all the more necessary,” Quach said.

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