Term two of the 2021-2022 school term kicks off today. Per a Ministry of Education (MoE) press release, students in Forms 4-6 are heading to physical school today, along with post-secondary and tertiary students, while everyone else is sitting down in front of their computers to continue digital school. However, Forms 1-3 and Standard 5 will be back in physical school (with the former on a rotational basis) a month from now. The same release revealed plans to have Standards 1-4 and ECCE students back in physical school on a rotational basis in term three, April 2022. Interestingly, the release didn’t mention First and Second Year students.

At this moment, we are two months and 13 days away from marking the two year anniversary since physical schools closed on a Friday afternoon in March of 2020. Way back then, the understanding was that the closure was temporary until we got a hold of this pandemic thing. Digital school began on the basis of the same understanding: that it was a temporary stopgap measure to provide some kind of learning environment for children while adults did what needed to be done to return to ‘normalcy’.

The rest is exasperating, infuriating history: We did not do what needed to be done. Enough of us failed to mask up and sanitise properly that laws had to be passed to force us into it. When vaccines became available, too many of us politicised and theorised and dilly-dallied while the virus spread and mutated.

While we did this, our children languished in digital school. The luckiest of them either already had their own devices (or parents who could afford to hurriedly provide them) and adults nearby with the luxury of paying enough attention to ensure that they were still getting some kind of education. The rest… well, we don’t really talk much about them unless we’re using them to make a point. We know, though. We know that an alarming number of children lack meaningful access to the kinds of devices they need to make the best of this bad situation. We know that while these students wait for the MoE to provide devices, they have to figure out how to share whatever is available with their siblings, using an adult’s phone where possible, enduring inadequate internet connections and struggling to pay attention in environments that aren’t conducive to learning. Then there were the ones who didn’t show up at all.

This has gone on long enough that some students have never experienced physical schooling with their peers. Others effectively have not received anything resembling an education for almost two years. The educational and social gaps which predated the pandemic have widened to chasms and I can’t imagine how long we’ll be dealing with its impacts.

It would be one thing if these were the unavoidable impacts of a global emergency unprecedented in our lifetimes. The fact that we could’ve at least mitigated this mess and gotten things under control sooner but chose not to, the fact that we actively failed our children while we played juvenile, petty games… I don’t know how we come back from that with anything short of a sharp 180° turn to common sense.

A cursory glance at the foolish games we’re still playing doesn’t suggest that that turn is anywhere on the horizon, though. Not with events allegedly sanctioned by the very people tasked with creating and upholding the restrictions that are supposed to reduce our spiralling case numbers (to say nothing of the daily double-digit death rate). Nor with the predictable (and yet, still incredibly disappointing) resistance to the Government’s impending vaccine requirement for the public sector. It’s clear we’re not quite ready to stop playing the ass just yet.

Even worse is when supposed experts see all of this and somehow decide to advocate for an immediate return to physical school for all students on the basis of the baffling justification that children are less likely to spread Covid to adults and that children only suffer minor effects. I cannot imagine how anyone could arrive at such a conclusion at a point where we are regularly setting new daily records for death counts (with December 2020 being our deadliest month so far), the Omicron variant is driving up child hospitalisations in the US, and we still don’t have a grasp on long Covid in kids, but here we are. I wonder about the motivations of such a stance, though, in a nation where a dine-in restaurant has to be a safe zone but a school does not. It is particularly curious given that teacher vaccination rates were conspicuously absent from the public service vaccine stats provided by the government last month.

We can pretend the decision to send unvaccinated children to school with maybe-vaccinated teachers has nothing to do with the steadily increasing caseload, but that doesn’t make it so. As much as I want my daughter to return to a life that allows her to interact with her peers and actually physically meet and spend time with her teachers, I’m not prepared to play dotish just to see the (much-needed) end of digital school.

I can only hope that the MoE isn’t planning to play dotish either, given the penultimate paragraph of their press release:

The Government holds out to parents that COVID-19 vaccines are available, and continue to be the best protection against becoming grievously ill if students contract the virus. Parents are therefore strongly encouraged to vaccinate their children as they return to the classroom.

Surely, the move to create “government safe zones” includes publicly-funded schools. And surely a government that would issue the above reminder would, at the very least, ensure that ALL students have the opportunity to be vaccinated before putting them in rooms with each other for hours each day.

Surely.