It is estimated that around 13,000 students from official schools in Colombia dropped out in 2020 due to difficulties in accessing virtual classes, a situation derived from the restrictions established in the prevention of Covid-19. The news of the vaccination plan in Colombia and the program that the government has established comes as a hope for a country that is suffocating from the economic and emotional consequences that the pandemic has left in its wake. However, without further discussion about the benefits of the vaccine, the country must begin to make a balance and plan of action to address one of the most important issues for Colombia, such as education, access to it, and equalization of students who dropped out or had limited access to class days.
In the United States, President-elect Joe Biden has argued that his country is facing a crisis in public schools that deserves to address this situation from the perspective of a national emergency. Along the same lines, Richard Carranza, Austin Beutner and Janice Jackson, education counselors from New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, respectively, affirmed through a recent Washington Post article that it was necessary to implement a Marshall Plan for official schools.
The Ministry of Education in Colombia has implemented efforts so that more and more students without access to digital devices can have a computer that allows them to receive their classes, however, the reality is that the country was not prepared to educate from digital platforms . At the beginning of the pandemic, more than half of the country did not have access to the internet, a significant percentage of teachers did not have the pedagogical skills to teach by videoconference, and many parents are not high school graduates.
With all this panorama, it is necessary for the government at the national and territorial level, to establish with the greatest possible certainty who were the dropout students, which were the areas and regions most affected. With this information, the appropriate leveling measures should be adopted as soon as possible, allocate the necessary resources to expand the staff of trained teachers in the most affected areas and encourage families so that by 2021 education is the number one objective one in Colombian houses.
We have adopted extraordinary measures in the face of the economic and public health emergency, now we must think of education as a central issue to get out of the pandemic and to recover the country from the lag it has left. In the balance of this year, universal access to education has been lost and with it, also the opportunity to reduce the social and economic gap in the country.
@tatidangond
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