Kerre Woodham: Surely schools can decide for themselves what is best for children and families?

Auckland, Northland and the Coromandel Peninsula have been given red level weather warnings, the most severe warnings as more rain is forecast to fall on the sodden regions. NEMA has issued a safety warning that the heavy rain could cause flooding, slips and damage because the ground simply can't take any more. And one way of trying to minimize the load on already stretched first responders and emergency workers is to minimise traffic on Auckland's roads while vital infrastructure is repaired.  

Accordingly, businesses were told to ask their employees to work from home and the Ministry of Education responded by directing all of the regions school', early childhood centres, and tertiary institutions to stay closed until the 7th of February.

So again, there has been criticism about how this was communicated. Most schools found out thanks to the media after some confusion as to whether they should be opening, and eventually the Ministry of Education took the decision to impose a lockdown, in effect, on schools in Auckland for a week.  

I totally understand why they want to minimize any chance of first responders being stretched thinly. I get that. But when you look at school attendance, truancy has never been worse. It's been steadily declining since 2015. Covid exacerbated the problem and that decline in school attendance has been across every decile, every year level, every ethnicity, in every region, and the biggest drop among primary and intermediate kids, who are the very ones that we can't afford to be skipping school.  

Fewer than 60 percent of students currently attend school regularly. So you've got kids who haven't been at school for more than two years, who are street smart but educationally below the line and who are using their street smarts to survive. 

We had callers last year saying they found it really difficult to get their teenagers to school. And these are kids from erstwhile “good” families where there is an expectation that young people will attend school. But you can hardly drag a six foot two, 100kg bloke into his school uniform and into the through the school gates. They have to want to go. But when the schools haven't prioritised attendance, when they've said look, you can learn at home. Why would you bother going? 

I think they are between a rock and a hard place that you need to give first responders and emergency workers the opportunity to patch up and repair what's broken before the forecast heavy rain.  But we have seen just how badly school closures have impacted young people. The principals warned that there would be a spike in youth crime with the Covid closures.

Schools should be shut as a measure of last resort, surely?  The schools in the worst-affected areas can be shut. Schools that can open should open. Schools have their own unique characters, personalities and communities. Surely they can decide for themselves what is best for their children and their families. 

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