Teachers and students from grades one to twelve are required to wear masks, students are to sit separately at each desk, and school buses are to cut the number of students in half for transportation, education ministry announced in a published statement.
The ministry also ordered the formation of “a special committee of teachers to monitor the COVID-19 situation in schools, in which a health worker will be a member.”
Free coronavirus tests will be offered to students and teachers, and mobile teams will visit areas and villages that do not have testing centres.
If a student tests positive for the virus, the classroom must be closed and sanitized, and its students quarantined for 14 days. If there are five infections in one school, the institution will be closed down for 14 days, the ministry stated.
Students with chronic illnesses should study online at home and only visit schools for exams.
Jutiar Adil, spokesperson for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), announced last week that schools will reopen on Sunday, three weeks earlier than expected.
Schools have been ordered shut and re-opened several times over the past year. They were first closed in late February 2020, before coronavirus cases had been recorded in Iraq. Schools were reopened for in mid-September for grade 12 students and in October for students in grades one and two, but were shut again on November 1, due to a spike in cases of the virus.
Grade 12 students returned to class last month.
Since the start of the pandemic, the Kurdistan Region has recorded 106,419 coronavirus infections, 101,250 recoveries and 3,485 deaths, according to health ministry data. The numbers of new cases have mostly stayed below 100 since mid-January. Iraq, however, has seen its numbers begin to increase over the past few weeks and the federal health ministry has warned of a possible second wave.
