Education Minister Ng Eng Hen (left) has ruled out a full scale shutdown of schools or delaying the start of the new school term which begins on Monday. --ST PHOTO: ALBERT SIM
ONE or two pupils felled by the H1N1 flu and the whole class may be sent home for a week. More, and the whole school may be ordered shut.
EDUCATION Minister Ng Eng Hen on Tuesday outlined how schools will deal with Influenza A (H1N1):
1. MOE will issue Leave of Absence (LOA) to all staff and students who have just returned from affected countries, on and after June 22.
This scenario might well be played out at various schools across the island over the next few months as part of the Education Ministry's approach to containing the spread of the H1N1 virus which has infected 194 people here so far.
Education Minister Ng Eng Hen has ruled out a full scale shutdown of schools or delaying the start of the new school term which begins on Monday.
Instead, he called on parents and students to brace themselves for classes, levels or schools to be shut as community infections spread.
'There may be situations where schools close, open, close... and I want to prepare the public and parents to prepare for this long and disruptive pattern,' he told a news conference on Tuesday.
Part of its focused approach: A seven day leave of absence for students who returned from affected areas, such as Australia, Hong Kong and Indonesia, on or after June 22.
This means that a student who arrives here on, say, June 25 from any one of the 15 places designated as a flu area, will only be allowed back in school on July 3, seven days after touch-down.
The question of school closures have engaged parents and students over the past week, even as teachers ready themselves to do home-based teaching via the internet and through the post.
Primary and secondary schools were shut down because of Sars in 2003 for more than a week, but Dr Ng is not about to do the same now. Sars, he noted, was virulent and short-lived, the H1N1 virus, on the other hand, 'will be with us for much longer''.
'It doesn't make sense to close systems, whether it's schools, businesses or camps, because how long will you keep it closed? Even if you are closed, the number of cases, not only in Singapore but around Singapore, will keep on rising. So we have to take a different approach.'
Read the full report in Wednesday's edition of The Straits Times.
