HAVANA, Cuba, Oct 18 (ACN) With the return to the classrooms this Monday of final-year students in several provinces and towns, Cuba will take another step towards the resumption of in-person education to finish the 2020-2021 school year in General Education.
Conceived as a gradual, staggered and safe process, this restart of face-to-face teaching activities follows the same three-group scheme of the vaccination campaign for the Cuban pediatric population between the ages of 2 and 18.
The first to receive the three doses of the vaccine Abdala were the students of 12th grade, third year of Technical and Professional Education (ETP) and third and fourth years of Pedagogical Training.
We are talking about less than 5% of the student population—84,585 of them—-, which makes the start of the process even safer in the midst of the pandemic restrictions, namely in terms of physical distancing, easier to manage and maintain when there are fewer students present and more premises available.
Since preserving health and life is and will always be the first and most important thing, the competent authorities decided to give other regions a little more time in view of their epidemiological situation.
“We will follow the process from up close, but everything has gone according to plan,” Minister of Education Ena Elsa Velázquez Cobiella pointed out to the press. She also remarked the need to observe the health protocols, the importance of the family’s support, and the preparedness and firm commitment of our teachers.
The Minister emphasized that this school year was designed with more flexibility, so that each center can organize its educational process according to its needs and conditions and concentrate efforts, for example, on those subjects that prove to be more difficult for the students, mainly those who have been ill or lost loved ones and, especially, those psychologically affected by so many months of confinement.
According to the schedule for the resumption of in-person learning, this advance party will be followed by a second and larger group of students of many different level on November 8, and a third and last group of students, who are currently being administered the also-Cuban vaccine Soberana 02, will do it on the 15th.