B.N.T.U. President Weighs in on Homeschooling

Elena Smith

Keeping it on education, we also asked President Elena Smith about homeschooling during this pandemic. The Ministry of Education has laid out the plans for homeschooling where parents need to hold an Associate Degree to be able to undertake home schools. 

Senator Elena Smith, National President, B.N.T.U.

“I saw some post on Facebook and one of the comments that was made was that they are asking parents for an associate degree to home school their children when we have ministers running this country who don’t even have that. It is ironic but we understand that you want that these children are engaged by persons who are qualified, as much as possible to work with these children. But at time this that might not be possible. And so we have been sending work home to these parents for the last three or four months we have been sending home work to them  and we were not worried whether they had a degree or not. The work was just sent home because we had to give them something to do. I don’t expect that parents are requesting homeschooling for the whole year. I am sure they are only requesting it for this period right now because of the situation that they don’t feel like the schools are ready and we have so many cases. They are not comfortable that their children will be safe at school. There has to be some way of working with it because if we end up with another lockdown we will end up with those same parents who will have to be working with their children anyway.”

Reporter

“Does the pandemic in your opinion trump students learning and receiving that education that they haven’t been getting in full for the past five months. If we continue like this we could go into six months, seven months, eight months, who knows?”

Senator Elena Smith

“At the end of day safety comes first and if I am dead I can’t teach anybody. So, I think we have to look at it from that view point, that safety is very important. Our children and our teachers’ lives matter. And we have to make that priority. Yes, education is very important. We understand that and we are fully aware of that. But we are also not considering how our children are able to bounce up. So, we might be underestimating our children’s ability to catch up at some point in time.”