Day 66 – (N)opening

A lot of schools have gone through a lot of work in order to get students safely back into the classroom. Obviously, there are huge numbers of rules that they have to follow regarding screening staff and students, social distancing, sanitation, numbers of students in the building etc etc.

Many schools have managed to work out a system to make this work. It’s been a huge amount of hard work, organisation and effort.

And then in step in the Department of Basic Education late on Friday evening, literally zero working hours before the schools are due to open, publishing rules that effectively make it illegal for many smaller and independent schools to open.

Government always makes it all better.

And so now (literally as I write) the Independent Schools Association of South Africa are meeting with the DBE and asking (probably) what the actual firetruck is going on. And then later today, a whole 13½ hours before the schools are/were due to (carefully) open their doors, a press conference from Angie et al.

Christ alone knows what she’s going to change this time.

Personally, when your graphs are looking like this:

…I don’t think it’s the right time to be sending kids (and teachers) back to school. But that’s beside the point. When you give schools a month to prepare for a given date and then you pull the rug at (even beyond!) literally the very last working minute, it smacks of complete and utter incompetence.

From the Department of Basic Education? Strange, that.