The coronavirus cabinet is meeting Monday evening to discuss whether more classrooms can open in the coming weeks and if additional areas of commerce can resume operation. The cabinet is also meant to discuss potential restrictions that could be put in place over the Hanukkah holiday.”I intend to call for the immediate return of all students in all classes to school,” Interior Minister Arye Deri said ahead of the meeting. “We must not lose an entire generation of children.”Similarly, ahead of the meeting, Education Minister Yoav Gallant tweeted that students in grades seven through 10 must return to school, too.“Seventh-, eighth-, ninth- and tenth-grade students – we have not forgotten you,” Gallant wrote. “Tonight, I will demand in the coronavirus cabinet meeting to allow you to go back to school as early as next week. Returning to school is the priority for me and the Education Ministry.”
תלמידי כיתות ז׳, ח׳, ט׳, י׳ – לא שכחנו אתכם. הערב אדרוש בקבינט הקורונה להחזיר אתכם לבתי הספר כבר בשבוע הבא – חזרתכם ללימודים עומדת בראש סדר העדיפויות שלי ושל משרד החינוך.סדר עדיפות לאומי נכון מחייב את חזרת התלמידים לבתי הספר. זהו נושא ערכי וצורך לאומי חיוני.— יואב גלנט (@yoavgallant) November 23, 2020
On Tuesday, students in grades five and six are meant to return to their classrooms, and students in grades 11 and 12 on the same day next week. In a presentation sent to the coronavirus cabinet on Monday, the Health Ministry flagged nine red and 22 orange localities in which additional classrooms will not be opened on Tuesday.
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Also on Monday, the Education Ministry released data that showed that of the 1,530 children in kindergarten through 12th grade who are infected with the coronavirus, 906 of them, or 60%, are from the Arab sector. Twenty-eight percent are from the general population and 13% are ultra-Orthodox.
Health Ministry director-general Chezy Levy has been supportive of opening schools ahead of the rest of the economy.
“Despite the desire to return to routine, we saw where we were and what happened to us” last time, he said in an interview with Army Radio on Monday. “Things are being done carefully. We have already tried opening retail in the past and we were up to 9,000 new cases a day. I am sure that Minister Gallant does not want that either. The price of opening the education system is a reduction of other things.”Health Minister Yuli Edelstein has expressed similar sentiments in various interviews and said that the ministers will have to choose between more open classrooms or open stores.
Health officials have said that children not being school does not only impact their book learning, but their social and emotional growth. A presentation prepared by researchers at Hebrew University showed that there has not been a direct connection between the rate of infection and children returning to school.
The move comes against the backdrop of calls by Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, the leading non-hassidic ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Israel, that all ultra-Orthodox girls’ schools and all grades in them should reopen.Despite a medical understanding that more reliefs cannot be implemented if schools are to resume, Economy Minister Amir Peretz said Monday that the discussion at the cabinet should center not on what to open but how to open it.“We need to behave differently,” he said in an interview with Reshet Bet. “There are a few good months until the vaccine arrives.”He claimed that the more stores that open, the more people will not be crowded in lines or inside them. At the meeting he added, “For several days now, there have been lengthy discussions between the Ministries of Economy, Health, Finance and Justice and the National Security Council on how to carry out the pilot [program in malls]. There is no reason to wait for the hearings to end and then set a date.”He called on ministers to approve the pilot program immediately.The pilot program is meant to see if the ability exists to control the number of shoppers entering the stores and to epidemiologically track them where there is an outbreak.At the same time, the cabinet will discuss new digital tracking tools that could help ensure that people isolate without violating their privacy, as some have claimed that the Shin Bet General Security Service tracking does.It was reported the cabinet meeting was delayed from Sunday to Monday in order to give ministers Izhar Shay and Ze’ev Elkin time to prepare an outline of potential technology solutions to present at the meeting.The new technology would either be utilized alongside or in place of the Health Ministry’s Magen 2 application, too.
The cabinet is also expected to approve an increase in bus occupancy from 50 to 75%, at the request of the Transportation Ministry. Passengers have noticed that the occupancy on many lines is already much higher than 50%, so instead of increasing the frequency of bus service, the cabinet has chosen to permit more passengers per bus. But the Transportation Ministry also noted in a memorandum: “Density in the queue at the entrance to the means of transportation will lead to increased exposure to the virus at the station.”
Hannah Brown contributed to this report.
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