SYDNEY, Jan 13 (NNN-AGENCIES) – As Australian children prepare for their third year of schooling during the pandemic, there is growing debate as to the most suitable time to reopen classrooms.
Queensland has broken ranks with the rest of the nation by declaring its school term will start with face-to-face classes on Feb 7, instead of Jan 24. Students in years 11 and 12, meanwhile, will begin online classes on Jan 31.
Announcing the change, Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk said, COVID-19 modeling projections had shown the highly contagious Omicron variant would likely peak in Queensland around the last week of this month, and the first week of Feb.
By delaying school for a fortnight, Palaszczuk said, students would avoid “heading back to primary or secondary schools just as the rapidly rising number of Omicron cases in Queensland hits its peak.”
“I know parents are concerned about sending children back to school at a time like this, so I want to assure them that delaying the start of the school year is a sensible solution,” she said.
That is a view generally shared by Dr. Divna Haslam, a clinical psychologist from the University of Queensland, Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, who said that, an advantage of the delay is that, it will give parents more certainty in planning their family and work schedules.
“I think a lot of parents may have expected school to start at the usual time, but then faced a snap lockdown due to a COVID breakout. This delay should make them feel more confident there won’t be a sudden change just after the term begins,” Haslam said.
Palaszczuk’s tactics, however, have been criticised by some politicians, including Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who said it could needlessly extend the disease’s duration.
“As we see the Omicron wave rise, I mean, sometimes you do things which just pushes the wave further out,” Morrison told reporters.
Meanwhile, Dominic Perrottet, premier of New South Wales, who is confronting Australia’s largest outbreak, is adamant that schools in his state will stick to their original starting date of Jan 28.
Speaking to reporters this week, Perrottet said, his state would have access to 100 million rapid antigen test (RAT) kits, which would be a “core part of the plans of getting kids back in their classrooms.”
One reason the RATs will be so vital is, no student aged from five to 11 will be fully vaccinated when schools reopen. The 2.3 million Australian children in that age group only became eligible for the first of their two jabs this week and, as such, it will be at least four more months before they can be fully vaccinated.
The potential for schools to become COVID-19 hotbeds has been noted by OzSAGE, a multi-disciplinary network of Australian pandemic experts.
In a statement this week, OzSAGE predicted that “sending unvaccinated children back to school at the predicted pandemic peak will worsen the situation.”
One of the variables of the fast-evolving crises is that, different regions of Australia will suffer outbreak peaks at different times.
Omicron first appeared in New South Wales in early Dec, before advancing into Victoria and Queensland then surging to other states, with the exception of Western Australia, which has kept its daily case numbers down to single digits.
The fact that other expected peaks are lagging behind those on the east coast could eventually create problems for those states’ education authorities, according to Haslam.
“I think Queensland was lucky because our peak is estimated to occur around the time school was due back,” she said. “It’s certainly easier to delay the start than it is to go back to school and then have lockdowns.”– NNN-AGENCIES
