No classes, no teachers, no friends, no games, and no daily routine that children are used to. Now all the days seem the same. The health crisis has significantly changed our day to day. This has been a radical change for all students of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), not only being inside all day long but trying to learn from somewhere other than school. Across the LAC region, primary education coverage is nearly universal which means that almost all children between 6 and 12-years old attend school regularly.
And one day, suddenly, everything stopped. And, as Gabriel García Marquez would say in his novel, perhaps “It was inevitable”.
Rosita looks through the window of her house in Guayaquil and remembers her school, her teacher, and her classmates. She does not understand why she can no longer go out to play with her friends in the neighborhood or visit her grandmother, nor why her father has not come to visit her in almost a month.
The current spread of coronavirus poses a major public health challenge to every country in the world. Schools and their administrators may be the next in line to face the test, as these institutions have traditionally been a key channel of contagion of all sorts of illnesses. Let’s take a look at the case of China—when the virus became endemic, school authorities postponed sine die the beginning of classes in 31 provinces.
The promise of inclusive education in Latin America and the Caribbean is still far from achieved, especially for the thousands of children and youth with some disability in the region. The probability of attending school for children between 6 to 11 years with disabilities is 8 percentage points lower compared to children without disabilities. And in high school, this gap only widens.