Lynmore Primary School principal Lorraine Taylor. Photo / File
Lynmore Primary School principal Lorraine Taylor. Photo / File
The Government has given the green light for schools to open under specific conditions next week, but some Rotorua principals are encouraging parents to keep their kids at home.
Education Minister Chris Hipkins also said that, under level 3 measures, most children would be expected to continue with distance learning,and schools would be open only for students up to Year 10 who needed to be there.
That primarily included students whose parents could not work from home.
Lynmore Primary School principal Lorraine Taylor said it would be ready to go next week but it would only have a skeleton staff.
Westbrook School principal Colin Watkins said yesterdaythe school was preparing a memo to go out, letting parents know about the environment the pupils would be in, if they came back to school.
"The children are not allowed to be in classes of more than 10 and have to maintain social distancing. It will be a very different and potentially unsettling environment to come into.
"The memo will paint a picture of the environment and lay down a few conditions."
Westbrook Primary School principal Colin Watkins. Photo / File
He said those pupils would still be taking part in the school's distance learning, just with a class teacher.
"It has the potential to be a bit lonely, but we will try to make it as supportive an environment as we can."
Watkins said the school needed to know which parents were opting to send their children back to school.
"So we will know within the next couple of days how many kids are coming back and what staff will be available."
He said parents were encouraged, wherever possible, to keep their kids at home.
Watkins said they had made a plan with cleaners to make the environment safe and ready, and planned how they would maintain it as a safe environment.
"We are pretty well ready. We want parents to know we've taken all the necessary precautions."
He said there would be lots of challenges as ''it's the nature of children to congregate and want to play and share''.
They could not do any of that, he said.
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"Even morning tea and lunch will have to be staggered. They can't play on the playground and they can't go out at the same time as another class.
"The situation has the potential for children to feel quite lonely and we want to make sure everything we do provides opportunities and resources, so they feel more at ease."
Reporoa College principal Brendan Carroll said they were surveying parents, to ask how they were going and if they intended to send their children back to school.
He said students at school would work online alongside students at home on the same lessons.
Hipkins said education for students in years 11-13 would continue remotely, and more detailed advice would be released over the next week.
He said children were at low risk, and it was possible to ensure they stayed in the same group of children each day.
There was no public health reason why children could not be together to learn, Hipkins said.
However, parents should keep their children at home if they could and any sick child should not go to school.
Hipkins also said distance learning would be with us "for some time", with 6700 internet routers and "thousands" of computers sent to households, prioritising NCEA students.
But he was confident that schools would be able to operate at level three.
Asked if teachers could opt out of returning to work because they were concerned about their safety, he said expected teachers "to do their bit".
