Schooling in a pandemic: One year on

When schools reopened in January 2021, after a nine months closure to stem the spread of Covid-19, uncertainty surrounded the fate of what would become of the institutions and safety of learners.

The fear at the time was that the school system would be overrun by the virus and that school-going kids would act as super-spreaders due to the congested nature of classes in public schools, poor sanitation and extreme interactions.

This caused panic among educators, parents and learners who grappled with the challenges of returning to school safely during the Covid-19 pandemic.

One year later, no evidence of extreme disease symptoms on school-going children and a sense of normalcy seems to finally be in view.

For the New Year,  schools will start reopening this Monday, January 3rd, 2022. Most learners will troop back on Tuesday and Wednesday for the third term.

It is expected that, by the end of 2022, all the time lost during the school closure will have been recovered. 

Come January 2023, the school calendar will have gone back to normal.

2021 will however remain one of the most challenging  years for the country's education system.

81 teachers lost their lives to Covid related complications.

The Star examines how the pandemic upended the education landscape in the past year, what it taught us about schooling, and where we go from here.

In the early phase of reopening, a major flipside of the closure was the huge number of students who failed to return to school when they reopened.

A report commissioned by President Uhuru Kenyatta released in June indicates that when schools reopened, over 375,000 learners in primary and secondary schools did not return to class.

The study titled ‘Promises to keep: Impact of Covid-19 on adolescents’ further showed about 250,000 of those who dropped out were girls, making them the most affected.

Boys accounted for about 125,000 of those who did not return to school.

Adverse effects of the closure, the report indicated, saw 165,000 adolescent girls aged between 10 and 19 either married or impregnated.

Beyond the mass drop out, those who had reported back to class did not have an easy time either; the race to recover the time lost saw schools mount aggressive and heavily-demanding crash programs.

Four school terms have been squeezed into 2021 and 2022 in a bid to recover the learning time lost during the long closure effected in 2020.

Ordinarily, all classes should have been reopening for a new academic year spanning 38 weeks.

However, for the next two years after the reopening, the school calendar was to span 34 weeks.

The ripple effects of this is that parents have been  hard hit financially.

Reeling from harsh economic times, they were faced with the burden of paying school fees for the four terms.

Parents paid school fees when schools opened for second term in January 2021 after a nine-month break, in May for the third term, then July for first term 2021 and in October when the second term begun.

They are now required to pay again starting tomorrow for the third term.

To cushion parents, the Education ministry last August reduced the fees charged by boarding schools owing to the shortened period learners were to spend at school.

Parents with children in Category A secondary schools (national schools and extra-county schools located in the towns of Nairobi, Mombasa, Nairobi, Kisumu, Nyeri, Thika and Eldoret) in the new fee guidelines were to pay Sh45,000, down from Sh53,554.

The fees for Category B schools (all other boarding schools, including extra-county not located in the towns named above) was Sh35,000, down from Sh40,535.

However, concern remained on the lack of enforcement leading to school heads defying the directive.

Amid the push and rush to recover the time lost, it also emerged that learning  in reading and math was negatively affected.

This was prevalent for children living in low-resourced communities.

The biggest changes also saw learners required to wear masks while in schools.

This to date remains the main prevention measure against the virus in the crowded institutions. 

With Omicron ravaging the world, and new infections rising, the schools are expected to remain strict on wearing of masks as learners troop back from this Monday. 

Despite the devastation caused by the pandemic in the education sector, it also revealed some interesting truths about education.

It taught the country that technology can be wonderful, but it will never replace the value of people in safe but rigorous learning spaces talking, playing, and working together.

It taught the country that a 20th-century model of schooling must be updated to prioritize the human aspects of education—not the mechanical ones—and push education to be simultaneously individualized and of common purpose.

The pandemic also taught that teachers should not be taken for granted.