: The Philippines Still Hasn’t Fully Reopened Its Schools Because of COVID-19. What Is This Doing to Children? #WorldNEWS If 17-year-old Ruzel Delaroso needs to ask her teacher a question, she cant

The Philippines Still Hasn’t Fully Reopened Its Schools Because of COVID-19. What Is This Doing to Children? #WorldNEWS
If 17-year-old Ruzel Delaroso needs to ask her teacher a question, she cant simply raise her hand, much less fire off an email from the kitchen table. She has to leave the modest shack that her family calls home in Januiay, a farming town in the central Philippines, and head to an area of dense shrubbery, a 10-minute walk away. There, if shes lucky, she can pick up a phone signal and finally ask about the math problem in the self-learning materials her mother picked up from school.
“Were so used to our teachers always being around,” Delaroso tells TIME via the same temperamental phone connection. “But now it’s harder to communicate with them. ”
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Her school, Calmay National High School, is among the tens of thousands of Philippine public schools shuttered since March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Delaroso is one of 1. 6 billion children affected by worldwide school closures, according to a UNESCO estimate.
But while other countries have taken the opportunity to resume in-person classes, the Philippines has lagged behind. After 20 months of pandemic prevention measures, amounting to one of the worlds longest lockdowns, only 5,000 students, in just over 100 public schools, have been allowed to go back to class in a two-month trial program—a tiny fraction of the 27 million public school students who enrolled this year. The Philippines must be one of a very few countries, if not the only country, to remain so reliant on distance learning. It has become a vast experiment in life without in-person schooling.
Read More: What Its Like Being a Teacher During the COVID-19 Pandemic
“[Education secretary Leonor Briones] always reminds us that in the past when there were military sieges, or volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, typhoons, floods, learning continued,” says education undersecretary Diosdado San Antonio.
But has it this time? Educators fear that prolonged closure is having negative effects on students ability to learn, impacting their futures just a time when the country needs a young, well-educated workforce to resume the impressive economic growth it was enjoying before the pandemic hit.
Globally, COVID-19 will be impacting the mental health of children and young adolescents for years to come, UNICEF warns. School shutdowns have already been blamed for a rise in dropout rates and decreased literacy, and the World Bank estimates that the number of children aged 10 and below, from low- and middle-income countries, who cannot read simple text has risen from 53% prior to the pandemic to 70% today.
If the pilot resumption of classes passes without incident, there are hopes for a wider reopening of Philippine schools.