Ministry of Education, has trained 92 Social Mobilisation Officers (SMOs) and School Based Management Committees (SBMCs) from Lere and Igabi Local Government Areas of the state on COVID-19 protocols.
The training was part of activities to scale up enlightenment in schools which had resumed full academic activities after the COVID-19 lockdown and other restrictions.
Declaring open the training on Wednesday in Kaduna, the Commissioner for Education, Dr Shehu Muhammad, said some of the learning crisis in schools was the issue of insecurity and COVID-19.
He said that the training became necessary to enhance prevention, early detection, and contact tracing of suspected cases of COVID-19 in schools.
“We still have different variants amongst us, people are still coming into the country, mutation is taking place, once such activities of humans keeps going on, there is likelihood of one variant to cross over to another, we still have a long way to go,’’ he said.
Muhammad explained that the SBMCs and SMOs at the advent of the COVID-19 were advised to ensure safety of children before going to school.
“We even advised them to organise a bus shuttle from their environment to school and the same bus to bring them back because mixing them with others in passenger buses will make them likely to get infected”.
He assured the SBMCs and SMOs of the ministry’s support and the plan to scale up the training to all parts of the state.
“We are already under an agile project, we have been training the SBMs, we have asked all schools particularly junior and senior secondary schools to open accounts where we will be supporting them with resources to address minor issues”.
He urged them to present themselves for COVID-19 vaccination when is starts in their communities so as to convey a message that the vaccine is safe for everyone.
“If you don’t take the vaccine, you are indirectly communicating to the community that ‘as I am educated and as far as I am concerned, the vaccine is not safe’, we have to lead by example”, Muhammad said.
Also, Alhaji Mu’azu Lawal, the ministry’s Director of Educational Planning, said the training would avail the participants the knowledge to also train others in their communities on COVID-19 protocols.
“There is the need to train teachers to imbibe the COVID-19 protocols to ensure healthy students.
“The Global Partnership in Education (GPE) selected only two LGAs as a sample, so as to have people who can be utilised to subsequently scale up the training to other LGAs in the state,’’ he said.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the training was funded by GPE and supported by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
(NAN)
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