
Kovid’s new national action plan: how schools and kindergartens will proceed
Attendance at schools and special education support centres (SENCs) will only be suspended as a very last resort. Primary classes will continue to attend in almost all cases. Kindergartens will not be closed at all. This is what is envisaged in the National Operational Plan to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic presented by the Ministers of Health and Education on January 13. What, in particular, is in the Plan and what is missing from it concerning the educational process?
Measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 are divided into four phases and will be implemented at local level depending on the risk assessment, especially in relation to the availability of intensive care beds in hospitals. Another innovative element in the Plan is that the risk assessment and the number of available intensive care beds will not be done at the district level but using the six Nuts 2 planning regions. What are the four stages and how will the education process work in each of them?
1. At 50% occupancy of intensive care beds (stage I):
- Controls for wearing masks, providing physical distance, disinfection, requiring “green certificate” for teachers, testing students without “green certificate” once a week will be increased.
- Interest classes and group activities are maintained, but without mixing students from different classes.
- Organised activities with students such as visits to museums, exhibitions, natural sites and other cultural, educational and educational events, planned excursions, green schools, hiking trips, etc. are suspended.
- Olympiads and competitions will be attended provided distance, green certificate or on-site testing of participants is available.
- Individual classes, counseling, testing for ongoing assessment, exams, etc. may be attended at the school or special education support centres and without COVID-19 testing of students if held outside of regular class tim
2. At 60% occupancyofintensive care beds in hospitals (stage II)
- interest-based activities will cease, except for those within the full-day school setting.
- The condition of not mixing students from different classes remains.
- Group activities for general and additional support for personal development will be held in attendance after COVID-19 testing once a week. Green Certificate holders will not be tested, nor will those already tested for regular school attendance.
3. At 70% occupancy of intensive beds (stage III)
- in addition to testing, half of the classes from Class V to XII will alternate in-person with online instruction during the week.
- Children up to class IV will remain in class.
- Possibly without rotation and with testing or “green certificate” will also be taught in special schools for children with sensory impairments and in CSCs.
4. With 80% occupancy of intensive beds (stage IV):
- Schools and CSCs will move to online learning
- If possible, attendance with testing will be maintained for children in primary grades. If necessary, they will also study from home, but for no more than one week.
Where the data require a move to Stage III or IV for a district, but there are sufficient available hospital beds for children in the district and the incidence of disease in a municipality is half the district average, then the more liberal anti-epidemic measures – for Stage II or Stage III respectively – may be applied to schools in that municipality, in consultation with the Ministry of Health. This will preserve attendance at school in the smaller municipalities of the so-called rural areas, as they usually have a much lower incidence of the disease than district centres. This has to be agreed between the PDE and the RHI.
What does the new Plan leave out regarding school education?
The Plan seeks to keep as many students as possible in classrooms for as long as possible. The pledge of the policy makers behind the Plan is that schools will be the last to close and the first to open as the fifth wave of Kovids sweeps over us. This approach is undoubtedly to be welcomed, as it is attendance that creates the conditions for higher quality education and narrows the educational gap. What the Plan overlooks in implementing this approach is the fact that many rural schools have small numbers of pupils, large facilities that allow for seamless compliance with all anti-epidemic requirements, and a low incidence of disease in the locality. We refer to ‘rural schools’ as the only educational institutions in the locality (village or small town). Many of these are in so-called ‘rural municipalities’, while others are in localities attached to large urban municipalities: most of the municipalities of regional centres also include many villages. They have functioning schools, albeit with small numbers of pupils.
It should be stressed that over 32% of schools in Bulgaria have less than 100 pupils. These are 704 schools. In spite of the school network optimisation of 2007 and 2008, which followed the introduction of delegated school budgets, small schools have and will have their place in Bulgaria due to the presence of many villages that are alive, i.e. where children are still being born. The secondary school system cannot cover the more remote villages, especially in the mountainous and semi-mountainous regions, and access to education is a fundamental principle that must be guaranteed. At the other extreme, 22% of schools with more than 500 pupils are full. For example, 92 schools have more than 1 000 pupils… They are usually located in Sofia, where more than 20% of Bulgarian pupils are educated, as well as in regional towns.
Transposing these disproportions to the lower secondary stage, we see that 43% of schools with lower secondary classes have up to 50 students in them. That’s 501 schools – primary, secondary or integrated. In these schools, the lower secondary class – fifth, sixth and seventh – is almost always made up of one class. The situation is similar in the 31% of schools with fewer than 100 pupils at upper secondary level.
An Amalipe Centre survey conducted in early February 2021 in 233 schools of the “Every Student Will Be a Winner” network for intercultural education shows that in schools with small numbers of students, it is categorically unjustified to keep some of the classes in distance education in an electronic environment. Returning the majority of schools with up to 120-150 students to classrooms will not seriously exacerbate the epidemic, the study shows. There are at least three reasons for this assertion:
- The first is strict compliance with anti-epidemic measures in small schools.
- The second reason is the availability of sufficient building stock and space to maintain social distance, even when all students return.
- Thirdly, the Kovid-19 pandemic is significantly less prevalent in closed rural communities. See more about the study and its results here.
It should also be highlighted that from mid-February 2021 until the end of the school year, schools have been given the opportunity to run in-person classes with one class. This did not lead to an increase in the incidence of illness in the respective localities and definitely saved the school year in these schools. The new Plan, published on 13 January 2022, partially includes this option. As we have indicated above, even under Scenarios 3 and 4, communities with incidence rates that are half the district average could implement the more liberal measures of Scenarios Two and Three. In the mass case, it is in rural municipalities that the incidence is double that in the district centre. However, this will not solve the problem in some of the rural municipalities as well as in the small settlements that are close to the district centres and are part of the respective urban municipality. The optimal solution is to allow attendance in single-grade classes in both scenarios 3 and 4.