Last week Wednesday, the Minister of Education announced that all students from forms 4 to 6 will be required to return to in-person school regardless of vaccination status. Dr. Nyan Gadsby-Dolly also mentioned that schools will no longer be required to provide online learning for these students. Generously, she gave unvaccinated students and their parents a whole five days to prepare for this latest shift, which came less than a month after physical school was originally reopened for fully-vaccinated form 4 to 6 students only.

At this point, I’m seriously curious about what’s going on inside the Education Ministry. While we are most certainly still in unprecedented times, at 20 months into this thing, we can’t still be operating in emergency mode. Surely, by NOW, the people tasked with leading this country’s education sector have enough insight to make rational and measured decisions about the way forward. All appearances to the contrary, this abrupt about-face can’t really be a case of the people responsible for the national molding of young minds giving up and flinging them into a situation all but designed to make the delta variant’s job as easy as possible, right?

But… if it’s not, how does one explain the way the original reopening of in-person school (which left unvaccinated students with whatever form of digital learning their individual school could cobble together) seemed to happen without proper consultation with the very people who had to figure out how to teach in two mediums simultaneously? Lest we forget, at the very same time, aspiring teachers were being turned away.

Similarly, how does one account for the strange dissonance in telling parents that their unvaccinated children couldn’t attend in-person school while also failing to ask teachers if they’d been vaccinated? Again, at almost exactly the same time, the very same government was rolling out rules for Safe Zones: places in which only vaccinated, masked and socially distanced people are allowed (including the officers checking compliance). Theoretically speaking, wouldn’t a vaccinated teen then be safer in a bar than in a classroom, particularly if the MOE is only requiring three feet of distance (contradicting the Health Ministry’s existing guidelines requiring six feet)?

Also, if we’re flinging unvaccinated teens, vaccinated teens and potentially vaccinated teachers together in hot classrooms, what happens when those teens and teachers go home to families that include vulnerable individuals? Does it make much sense to keep primary schools closed if we’re sending some of their parents and elder siblings into a secondary school petri dish?

I’m not being facetious here; I would genuinely like to understand the rationale behind these decisions, particularly given the copious examples we have of all the ways things go wrong when officials throw up their hands and forget that there are literal children in the middle of these petty little rounds of tug of war.

I’m also not pretending that any of this is easy or that there’s one right decision that will make everyone happy. I’m simply suggesting that we let common sense win out over politics just this once. We know why the Ministry of Education would claim cluelessness about teacher vaccination rates (and the relevant union would stay mum on the topic). Just like we know why the MOE would conveniently ‘forget’ the existing legal precedent for mandatory vaccination. This means we pretty much know why they would take this approach even as a more communicable variant spreads and at a point where our parallel healthcare system is once again nearing capacity.

It’s truly disappointing to see a government that made the necessary hard decisions to keep this nation safe at the beginning of this mess make these kinds of moves this late in the game, at a point where we actually have the means to finally end this ordeal.