School council president urges Victorian Education Minister to delay return to classrooms

A Melbourne school council president has written to the Victorian Education Minister urging him to delay the return to face-to-face learning by four to six weeks.

Taylors Lakes Primary School council president, Dr Shane Huntingdon, says returning to classrooms on January 31 is “lunacy”.

He’s written to Education Minister James Merlino asking him to push back the return of on-site learning.

“If we go back unprepared kids are going to get sent home all the time in this current wave and it will be random, and parents will be yanked out of work, they won’t know when or where they have to do these things,” Dr Huntingdon told Neil Mitchell.

“If we have a bit of a delay we can actually sort of schedule these things more effectively.

“It’ll be easier for kids and easier for parents, and beyond that, it’ll be actually fair on our teachers. I mean, putting them into this sort of environment is just unbelievably careless.”

Dr Huntingdon says there will still be some unpredictability if schools return to on-site learning in four to six weeks, but more mitigation strategies will be in place by then to help curb the impact of COVID-19 cases.

“By that stage all the primary kids would have at least their first dose, some we could get that down to a three-week gap and we could get their second dose of their vaccine, all the teachers would have access to the boosters,” he said.

“But opening up with none of those mitigations in place, right near the peak of this current wave, is just lunacy and we shouldn’t do it.”

Press PLAY below to hear the argument for delaying the return of on-site learning