Union of Education: More than 6,900 classrooms closed in 28 provinces until mid-term break
About 18 million students and over 1 million teachers across Turkey had returned to schools on 6th September, after a one-and-a-half-year interval. Students have entered a nine-day break as of Friday.
An official from EGITIM-SEN (union of education) shared following evaluation: “We published weekly tables starting from September 13. Then, as of five weeks ago, we stopped publishing these tables. The reason for this is that starting from the time we began to publish our case studies, there was a pressure on school administrators and cases were not made public (they were concealed). Thus, we stopped publishing these tables to avoid putting education workers in a difficult situation. But we kept records.
According to data from 28 provinces, more than 6,900 classrooms were closed from September 6 to November 12. According to the official data announced by the Ministry of Education, when we consider the average class sizes over 25 students, we see that 172,500 students were affected by the closure of classes which had to switch to online education. When we compare this with 81 provinces, we can state that the number is almost over 500 thousand, approaching 600 thousand. So, in this process, more than 600 thousand students had to undergo distant education.
Number of cases is up to 70 thousand
For eight weeks, an average of about 4 thousand of our teachers were in contact (with virus) or in a positive state. If we spread this throughout Turkey, it corresponds to a number of up to 12 thousand. Because the data we receive is on average from 28 provinces. Again, on average, 23,500 students in 28 provinces are contacted or positive, compared to the whole of Turkey, we can state that this corresponds to a number of close to 70 thousand.”
Source: diken.com.tr/egitim-sen-ara-tatile-kadar-28-ilde-6-bin-900den-fazla-sinif-kapatildi/
