Schools across Kurdistan Region to reopen next week: KRG

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Schools across the Kurdistan Region will be reopened on Sunday, the government announced on Wednesday in a press conference.

The decision came following a joint meeting between the ministries of education and health to discuss the status of the pandemic within the federal autonomous region of Iraq, which has its own cabinet in addition to the national Council of Ministers in Baghdad that manages the coronavirus response in provinces outside the Kurdistan Region.

“We decided to reopen schools on Feb. 7 for all grades,” said Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Spokesperson Jotiar Adil in a press conference in Erbil.

Regional Education Minister Alan Hama Said also spoke at the event, announcing that “all safety measures” would be applied at every educational facility in order to mitigate the risk of the coronavirus spreading among students.

Schools and other educational institutions were first shut down in early February 2020, even before the Region had confirmed any cases of the highly-contagious virus.

Schools were then closed in September 2020 more comprehensively after surges in coronavirus cases in the region, which health authorities blamed in part on in-class schooling where the practice of social distancing was limited.

After such restrictions were discussed within the government, the KRG announced in November that it would continue the ban on in-class studies for another month due to a spike of infections among teaching staff and students.

Classes were expected to resume in early December, but the COVID-19 task force decided to extend that suspension until the infection rates appeared more stable.

Read More: COVID-19: Kurdistan Region moves to online learning as daily infections spike

Returning back to in-person sessions are not mandatory for students, according to the education minister.

“Parents that do not want to take the risk of sending back their kids to school can declare that in the first week of classes,” remarked Said, explaining that households that have members in high-risk categories for the coronavirus might not want to take the risk of sending their children back to school, thus endangering elderly or infirm relatives.

The Region has recently seen relatively low daily infections compared to the previous months where figures reached more than 1,000 coronavirus cases per day.

The Kurdistan Region has so far seen over 106,000 infections since its first case in early March, along with more than 3,400 fatalities.

The coronavirus has infected more than 104 million people worldwide and killed over 2.2 million, according to Johns Hopkins University’s database. The actual figures could be dramatically higher due to insufficient testing capabilities or underreporting.

Editing by John J. Catherine