Keep schools clean
The deprivation of basic sanitation and hygiene needs at school cries out for attention as pandemic demands focus on online education, but now is a chance to fix the system to equalise access to and the maintenance of sanitation standards and hygiene practices at schools.
Child safety has been compromised further by the coronavirus. Repeated school re-openings and closures harm students in more ways than the disruption to their learning. A school is supposed to be a safe place for students, but it has turned into a danger zone in the time of the pandemic as the coronavirus was not earlier seen as a big threat to children.
Early April, after 13 long months of not seeing her classmates and teachers in person, my niece studying at a school in Kuala Lumpur anxiously returned to school. By late April, she was asked to quarantine herself at home and had to get tested for Covid-19. After getting tested twice in two weeks and getting negative results, my niece's school was again closed to physical attendance.
The ongoing spread of the coronavirus is a strong reminder for meeting the basic sanitation and hygiene needs at all schools.
According to a joint report by the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) and the World Health Organization (WHO), if we want to achieve universal access to basic sanitation and hygiene services at schools by the year 2030, we need to increase the current progress rate by four to five times. Yet, by 2030 the world would have been jeopardised by more than several waves of the coronavirus and its variants.
As an educator, I was as surprised to find soap missing at schools in an upper-middle income country as when I observed students at a private high school in a highly developed country leaving their books on the ground in restrooms. However, this was the pre-pandemic period. The widespread contagion has certainly accelerated the growth of the educational technology sector, but attention needs to be refocused on better sanitation and hygiene access and education at schools globally.
Before the onset of the pandemic, an estimated 698 million children worldwide lacked access to basic sanitation services at school. Covid-19 has exacerbated this challenge, for school sanitation access is no longer about having a functional latrine or students getting a teacher's permission to use it. With human excrement contributing to contagious diseases, access to basic sanitation at school in the time of Covid-19 means getting to use a clean toilet and sitting in a classroom which is regularly sanitised, if not disinfected.
Where standards of sanitation at schools are met, hygiene is not always well-practised. With schools reopening during the pandemic, where soap was previously missing, it is now provided in student restrooms. Despite the need to, not all students will use the soap provided. According to my niece, "Nobody wants to touch the bar of soap in the restroom because many people have used it." Even when hand sanitising gel is provided in the classroom, "it is just sitting there".
Today, sanitation policies are not lacking in many parts of the world and yet, ineffective policy implementation is posing a continuous hazard to the public. In 2019, only five countries worldwide were found to have approved sanitation policies with adequate budgets and manpower to ensure successful practice in urban areas. Since the pandemic, reduced education budgets in two-thirds of low- and lower-middle-income countries mean that the challenges of meeting universal sanitation and hygiene needs at school persist.
While some may argue that schools are rarely coronavirus hotspots as children are unlikely to spread the virus, given the reduced education budgets in vulnerable communities, stricter precautions to prevent new waves of the coronavirus transmitting at schools become even more critical. In less than eight weeks after reopening, teachers and family members of students at the schools my niece and nephew attend were found to either be carriers of the coronavirus or have passed on due to it.
If my elementary school-going nephew needs regular reminders at home on how germs can spread and to scrub his hands thoroughly with soap, surely a more stringent approach at school is needed given the number of students interacting with one another daily.
If we want to curb the spread of contagious diseases, we need to take action that ensures the efficacy of sanitation services and hygiene practices at schools. When it is not enough to have policies approved or to have financial and manpower resources made available, stakeholders in the school community can take the lead in the provision of acceptable sanitation facilities and design hygiene practices that are essential to local needs. Where necessary, each break between classes can be a time for students to wash their hands and clean their desks before class begins.
Nobody wishes to see any school listed as a coronavirus hotspot. For students who are attending school physically or can do so soon, they should be able to attend with the confidence that there is access to functional restrooms where soap has become routine to touch.
KUALA LUMPUR