FG: We’ll not take risk over school reopening

Mr Emeka Nwajiuba, the Minister of State for Education, says the Federal Ministry of Education will not take any risk over reopening of schools in the face of COVID-19.
Nwajiuba said this at the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 daily news conference on Wednesday in Abuja.
He said that the schools would not reopen until government was sure that the children could go to school safe and not infected with the deadly coronavirus or got infect by others.
He said that it would work in conjunction with the World Health Organisation (WHO) before the reopening of schools.
The minister added that the ministry would publish what must be done before schools could be reopened by either private or public school.
He also said that the children must go to school safe.
“We want all our children to go to school by the time the schools would have been able to achieve physical distancing,’’ he said.
Nwajiuba explained that for tertiary institutions, there would be need to have a semester within a semester for the students.
He added that while some courses would do their semester first, others would follow suit in a bid to maintain social distancing measure.
He urged lecturers in tertiary institutions to use the period to upgrade themselves.
“Period like this should not be wasted and tertiary institutions must be functioning.’’
For secondary school students, the minister said that those in senior secondary might resume before their junior counterparts.
He said the plan was that the children should resume by the time schools had achieved the physical distancing measure.
“We may have classes in the morning and afternoon at the moment for the purpose of social distancing and all the infrastructure within the school will be used to achieve this,’’ the minister said.
He said that the ministry would also look at the sanitary condition of the schools before reopening, noting that schools must be ready to display manually-made hand sanitisers’ machine.
He said that the only condition for reopening of schools would be that they must be ready to receive the students by providing all the needed materials to stop the spread of COVID-19.