The Commission on Higher Education has asked President Rodrigo Duterte to allow the expansion of limited face-to-face classes to other courses aside from health allied programs.
“Our request, Mr. President, is to expand this policy to other programs that also need face-to-face classes,” Ched chairman Prospero de Vera said during Duterte’s Talk to the People aired Saturday morning.
De Vera said Ched is seeking to expand face-to-face classes for the following courses: engineering, hospitality/hotel and restaurant management, tourism and travel management, marine engineering, and marine transportation.
The proposal was already endorsed by the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Infectious Diseases .
De Vera said 13,188 students taking up medicine and allied health courses in 118 schools nationwide are allowed to hold limited in-person classes.
Of the total, close to 10,000 students have been vaccinated.
“Limited in-person classes have so far been safe. Our guidelines are stringent – 24 pages jointly crafted by Ched and the Department of Health,” De Vera told Duterte.
The President has yet to approve the Ched proposal.
Classes will resume in public schools on Monday with over five million students less compared to last school year’s enrollees as the government has yet to green light the resumption of in-person learning, with minors still excluded from the COVID-19 vaccination program.
Education Secretary Leonor Briones will lead the virtual National School Opening Day program with the theme “OBE 2021: Bayanihan para sa Ligtas na Balik Eskwela.”
“This school year, we would like to honor everyone who made learning continuity possible amid the challenges of the pandemic. Our efforts throughout the year showed our deep understanding that education is our shared responsibility,” Briones said.
Based on its latest data, the DepEd said a total of 21,034,472 or 80.2 percent of the 24.7 million students recorded last year have enrolled so far for School Year 2021-2022.
The Food and Drug Administration has allowed the emergency use of the COVID-19 vaccines of Pfizer and Moderna for minors aged 12 to 17.
But Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said the government may gradually include children in the COVID-19 vaccination program only in the fourth quarter of the year.
On Friday, South Africa launched the main phase of a global COVID vaccine study on children and teenagers led by Chinese maker Sinovac Biotech, with the first two participants jabbed in Pretoria.
The study is testing the efficacy of Sinovac’s two-dose CoronaVac on 14,000 children aged between six months and 17 years in Chile, Kenya, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Africa.
CoronaVac is approved for use among adults in over 50 countries. China recently cleared it for use in minors, where it has already been administered to millions of children aged three to 17.
“We see a lot of milder and less severe disease in children, but they still remain susceptible,” project director Sanet Aspinall told reporters at the event.
“They are… getting the infection and they are then able to transmit it to the rest of the population,” she explained, assuring the Chinese vaccine was safe. With AFP