MoE TO PREPARE REHABILITATION OF SCHOOLS
KUWAIT CITY, June 8: Minister of Education and Higher Education Dr Saud Al-Harbi has instructed services supervisors in the ministry and educational zones to prepare detailed reports on the process of rehabilitation of 956 schools in various parts of Kuwait as part of the preparations for the next academic year, reports Al-Seyassah daily.
He requested a clear time plan from various aspects to restart the schools, especially those used by other government agencies to combat the COVID-19 crisis, which are about 400 schools. During his meeting with the ministry’s undersecretary and the directors of administrative affairs and services sectors, Dr Al-Harbi stressed the importance of setting in place an executive plan to equip schools in terms of resuming studies and preparing for the start of the new academic year, as well as enumerating the requirements for rehabilitating the schools used by other government agencies to combat COVID-19, and developing a rehabilitation plan to sterilize them once they are handed back to the ministry or finding alternatives if those government agencies want to continue using the schools and developing several scenarios in this regard.
In this regard, educational sources stated that resumption of schools, following their suspension since the end of February, requires strenuous efforts to rearrange, clean and conduct maintenance work due to the fact that these facilities have been unoperational for the past four months, adding that this status quo might continue if the health authorities decide to prolong this period based on health considerations.
They stressed that the ministry is going through exceptional circumstances to prepare for the academic year, adding that under usual conditions, such preparations take place during the summer vacation with the availability of all the service providers and cleaners.
However, the sources revealed that the concerned sector, under the current situation, can barely fulfill the requirements of cleaning, maintenance of air conditioning, and handling electrical faults, as this requires constant and continuous work to prepare schools, due to the preventive and precautionary measures to protect students and employees. They indicated that the absence of some employees under the cleaning contracts and the presence of others in the isolated areas will be one of the obstacles that require quick solutions to address them.
The sources highlighted the shortage of workers for security services in some schools due to which the ministry is working on providing alternatives to address this shortage, besides the periodic work for air conditioning maintenance, replacing the damaged ones with new ones, and renewing the water filters and tanks