Consult parents on vaccine first

Calls are being made for comprehensive consultation with parents before COVID-19 vaccines are made available to children ages five to 11 as a key element for a return to face-to-face classes.

In fact, General Secretary of the Barbados National Parent-Teacher Association (BNPTA), Nicole Brathwaite is trusting education officials to fulfill a promise that no child would be excluded from in-person instruction because of their vaccination status.

On Wednesday, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Kenneth George revealed that public officials here were “close” to making a determination on the approval of the Pfizer vaccine for young children here, following similar clearance in the U.S.

Brathwaite said the BNPTA expected that the new vaccines would be made available to young children here shortly and predicted that as with other aspects of the country’s vaccine campaign, it would be embraced by some parents and shunned by others.

“It is still fairly new and of course with the younger children, people may be a bit more hesitant and you might find the wait and see would be more present in people’s minds,” Brathwaite told Barbados TODAY.

Despite recent suggestions that the Government holds the legislative power to mandate vaccines as a prerequisite for entry into school, Brathwaite declared that the ultimate decision regarding the wellbeing of minors must rest with parents.

“We would advocate for educating persons and exposing them to the information as it relates to the research and the findings that have led to the okaying of that particular drug for this new age group so that they would be a little more comfortable with the information. People will not feel comfortable if they don’t know certain things,” said Brathwaite.

“Who are the people that have been tested? Has it been tested on people of our race and what have been the outcomes?

“I think that information, coming from the paediatricians and so on would be a little more comforting rather than it coming from the BNPTA, because that is their forte. Once it is safe and it has the support of the paediatricians and so on, we would encourage persons to make those informed decisions in the best interest of their children,” she added.

Given the perceived negative impact of online school on children, the BNPTA is looking forward to all students being welcomed into the classrooms.

“You may not get everybody vaccinated, but you still have to make education available for everyone. That is why they are saying that even persons who are unvaccinated will have the opportunity to be in the classroom and I think that that will put certain persons who are concerned about that at rest. They would know that their child can still get into the classroom and access the same education as everybody else,” said Brathwaite.

“Before we had access to the vaccine, the children were out to school, some up to five days a week where the class sizes were small enough and the rooms large enough to have the children adequately spaced and so on,” she added.

The BNPTA General Secretary revealed that parents have been struggling to balance work with online classes even more than they did in the early months of the pandemic. With more of them returning to work, the process of supervision has been an increasing challenge.

“Some people even went as far as having their children enrolled in daycares while they go out to work and logging onto daycares. But the challenge with that is that the aunties at the daycares have had their hands full, because some of them had nine or ten children at the daycare centre who have to be online at the same time, not all at the same school or in the same class, so it has been difficult on those aunties in the nurseries.

“To my mind, teachers have been better prepared because it is not now their first rodeo on this online circuit and many of them would have learnt new skills and new ways of presenting things to the children. This would have made it easier than the first time around when it was a lot of trial error and a lot of quick ‘learn and do’. (KS)