PETALING JAYA: Parents of students at SMK Kota Kemuning in Selangor are calling for the school to be closed temporarilty and classes moved online because of Covid-19 infections.
A teacher and four students contracted Covid-19 recently and 182 students and 41 teachers from six classes have been placed in quarantine.
However, the district health office decided that the school can be allowed to open as usual.
A circular by the school dated April 14 informed parents that two students and a teacher had tested positive for the virus. Two more students tested positive over the next two days.
In an April 16 circular, the school decided to quarantine a total of six classes, involving 182 students and 41 teachers who were all made to wear surveillance wristbands. Forty-three students were required to be swabbed.
However, the district health office decided that the school could remain open as usual.
A parent, Shashi Kumar Shanmugam, 47, said many parents felt that it was unsafe to allow their children to return to school, and the parent-teacher association had been urged to ask the school to close.
However, the school and PTA informed parents that the final decision was up to the district health office, prompting the parents to reach out to the state health department to close the school.
He said an online petition calling for closure would be started soon.
Kumar, a father of two children, told FMT that many parents had stopped sending their children to school since last week, concerned over the possibility of other undetected Covid-19 cases.
“Parents are not happy over why our children still need to go to school. What we’re saying is that it’s better to go back to online classes to keep Covid-19 cases from spreading,” he said.
He said the school was short of teachers with many told to quarantine and some classes were being conducted without any teachers present.
Another parent, who wished to remain anonymous, said the student who tested positive on April 15 was only detected because the parents voluntarily sent their child to be screened.
She also claimed that the school had tried to keep the matter under wraps, much to her annoyance. Parents had first found out about the first Covid-19 case, the teacher, through other sources instead of the school.
She told FMT that the teacher had tested positive on April 9, but claimed that the school only said they knew about it on April 12. She questioned why the school was only informed some three days later.
“We came to know on Tuesday night (April 13), after they asked the kids in the front row (of her son’s class) to go back and quarantine. On Wednesday morning, they sent a memo to all students to come to school with one parent, which we did on Thursday morning.
“I was hoping that they would give a memo that the school will be closed from Monday,” she said.
Attempts to contact the school and district health office were unsuccessful. FMT has also reached out to the state health exco for comment.
There has been a spate of outbreaks in schools recently, with several Covid-19 clusters detected in schools and educational institutions in the past week.
Most recently, Puay Chai 2 school in Bandar Utama, Petaling Jaya closed temporarily after six students tested positive while Pin Hwa 1 school in Shah Alam, which is under the same district health office as Kota Kemuning secondary school, was also instructed to close after three teachers were found Covid-19 positive. - FMT
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