7 News Belize

What Do Tertiary Students Think?
posted (May 5, 2020)
And while secondary schools are urged to show compassion with promotions, tertiary institutions have pretty much been left on their own.

Last week the National Student Union of Belize held a forum to discuss the state of education generally under the state of emergency. Panelists NSUB executive director Dominique Noralez, Rhodes Scholar elect Abby Godoy Guillen and UWI student Rolando Caballero gave three unique perspectives on the difficult realities of the 2020 academic year. And in the first part of their discussion, we asked their opinion on whether schools should be allowed to re-open.

Rolando Caballero
"I don't think that the Swedish model can be applied to Belize. We cannot open schools right now because there are so many things going on and we definitely cannot handle you know what would happen if things were to blow up in Sweden as it has in comparison to their neighbors in Belize. We definitely can't handle it. So I think we need to stick to the measures that we have now and try to work with it and try to find how to develop it further so that students can know work from home rather than going to school because I cannot see how we are going to perfect that."

Dominique Noralez
"I tend to agree with that because I don't know how strong our health system is to handle that type of shock and Mariane M. hearts Santana has said recalled that many students live with parents and grandparents, so that poses a risk as well outside of just having the children build up immunities they have to go home to families so that model may not work for us."

Abby Godoy Guillen, Rhodes Scholar elect
"There's still so much that we don't know yet. So I was reading this research that was talking about how young adults between 20-30 had a pattern now of heart disease and stroke. So I feel like there hasn't been enough time for us to study what exactly happens after you recover and while I'm sure the kids immunities can build up, I am very scared for myself and I would not want to be exposed to it. It sounds very unpleasant and I rather not take my chance with it."

Next up on the agenda was web-based learning. It's quickly become the socially distanced method for educators to communicate with their students but it's not an automatic solution. And in one segment of the discussion, the panelists advocated for a percentage of their peers without access to the required equipment or internet connection to keep up with their studies.

Dominique Noralez
"Well the President of the University has said, in his last release he asked the telecommunication companies to give students a 3 month. asked the telecommunication companies to give access to students. I Don't know how effective it is to put that in a press release like that. I think that would have to be a very institution to institution kind of situation and so his advocacy cannot stop there in that press release. I think it has to go beyond and he has to sit down with whoever it is that brands Digicell or smart and that communication has to be done institution to institution leader to leader of those two institutions."

Rolando Caballero
"It's not about the possibility it's about we have to do it not because we're going through this but to develop capacity in case something else happens along. So they would have to find a way and again working with telecommunication and the private sector and again ministry could generate those online systems and to find a way to, you know propel to change how we do things in Belize."

"You just can't tell students to voluntarily withdraw if you don't have the means. I don't think anybody wants to withdraw from school coming this far. So I find it very very alarming."

Abby Godoy Guillen, Rhodes Scholar elect
"I know that UB put in a lot of effort to send out surveys and I know that we have 4% of students who do not have access to Laptops or access to the technology of any kind and would not be able to participate in whatever learning modules we present. So with that in mind, there's not really anything we can do other than advocate and try to create an option for them which is why I believe that they started with the involuntary withdrawal and they asked that you just work one on one with your teacher maybe you can find a way to work it out I mean it's very unfortunate but I at this moment don't see how we can open up those avenues like you said unless we have a dialogue with stakeholders and we like I mentioned earlier have a community effort that's the only way this is going to work. You're going to need someone to give and not expect anything back other than the reward of knowing that they helped someone else out."

We'll have more from the panelists tomorrow night when we hear their response to the Ministry of education's expressed opinion that tertiary education students are the least of their problems.

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