Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Sunday approved an outline for the opening of the school year under coronavirus.
According to the outline, which still needs to get the approval of the coronavirus cabinet and will take effect if the country won't go into lockdown amid rising cases, studies will open as usual from kindergartens to high schools under six "layers" of protection measures, including serological tests that will begin this week, rapid tests that will be provided to parents, testing in schools in virus hotspots, social distancing and hygiene measures and a special learning model for classes in which a student tests positive, the pilot of will begin tomorrow with the opening of the school year in the ultra-Orthodox community.
In accordance with the outline, from this week until the return of students to kindergartens and schools, 1.6 million children, from kindergartens to sixth grades, will be invited to perform serological tests.
Parents will be summoned to come with their children to health clinics or public centers that will be set up to perform the test. The Education Ministry estimates that between 20% and 30% of students will have antibodies and they will be exempt from isolation even if they come in touch with a confirmed patient.
The state will also provide rapid tests for parents who will need to test their children 48 hours before the start of the school year. In case one of the students test positive, their classmates will have to get tested every day for a week to avoid isolation. Students who do not want to get tested will go into isolation as has been the practice until now.
The pilot will also expand to Arab localities in September and only then the government will decide on expended to the general sector.
Students living in areas with high coronavirus infection rates will be tested once every week to detect any outbreaks early.
In parallel with the national vaccination campaign, the ministry stressed that students will have to continue wearing masks, observing social distance, maintaining hygiene and learning in open spaces as much as possible.
Bennett praised Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz and Education Minister Yifat Shaha-Biton, with the latter saying that "students' return to a learning routine in schools and kindergartens has a decisive effect on their personal and social mental resilience and on the shaping of their personalities, and therefore there is no doubt that their place is the educational institutions."