We were not ready to reopen schools - Kofi Asare

Africa Education Watch's Kofi Asare has said that the country was obviously not ready to receive children back to school considering the fact that common PPEs are yet to be provided to the schools.

He said that the Ghana Education Service’s delay on the provision of Personal Protective Equipment to the schools is evidence that the decision to reopen schools was rushed.

“We have indicated that PPEs have delayed and the GES is now saying that they will arrive at the end of the week. And so obviously, we are not ready to open schools – we rushed it,” he said.

Kofi Asare, who is the Executive Director of the Africa Education Watch, speaking in a telephone interview with GhanaWeb, expressed his disappointments in the slow efforts at ensuring that schools were appropriately prepared before students returned to the classrooms.

“The PPEs are not there. We have not learned lessons from the reopening of schools last year at all and that is very disappointing. Our readiness is quite questionable because we visited schools that still have class sizes of 70 and 80,” he lamented.

He described such an arrangement as throwing the protocols away and for that reason, he has called on parents to take a keen interest in understanding the situations their children are returning to in school.

He said that on issues like these, the decision making bodies are usually defensive because it is their jobs that people are being brought into question and that is why it is incumbent on the parents to ensure that their wards are being taught under the appropriate conditions.

“If not, if there are any lapses in the health safety protocols and there is an outbreak, eventually, the parents are going to be the second recipients after the teachers because when the child closes from school, they go home,” he admonished.

Ghana’s COVID-19 cases have seen a sharp rise in numbers with the president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo sending an indication that if the continuous flouting of the safety protocols persists, he will have no other option than to initiate a partial lockdown in the country again.