Schools Advise Beijing Teachers, Students Abroad to Stay Away For Now

With COVID-19 now spreading more rapidly overseas than inside China, teachers and students who are currently outside of Beijing have received messages from their schools advising them not to return until a formal reopening date for schools is announced, according to teachers and families.

Several families with children in international schools as well as teachers acknowledged receiving the message on Wednesday afternoon.

The note comes more than a month after schools were scheduled to resume after the Chinese New Year, but due to the outbreak that hit Beijing in late January, all school campuses have been shut. Most except the youngest grades have been conducting online classes in the interim.

No school or after-school training in Beijing may reopen off-line teaching before authorized to do so by the Beijing Education Commission, which in turn oversees each district’s bureaus.

What is true is that no teachers, students, or administrators are allowed to return to any school campus until:

1. Formal permission to reopen is given by educational authorities, and;
2. The individual has conducted a 14-day self-administered home quarantine in Beijing.

The announcement comes at a time when the spread of COVID-19 has been largely controlled in almost all of China, while overseas infections are on the rise.

Officials now see the biggest risk to cities like Beijing is the re-importation of the disease from travelers returning from overseas.

China customs has already confirmed 75 inbound passengers as carriers of the disease, with another 779 suspected of being infected.

Earlier this week, two planes arriving in Beijing from Moscow were discovered to be transporting passengers with the virus.

While we have no accurate stats on how many teachers and families with school-aged children are still outside Beijing, estimates range all over the place, from 25 to 75 percent. A survey circulated at the beginning of February to WeChat groups heavily used by local parents and teachers indicated that 30 percent had left Beijing to wait out the crisis.

To date, we have no word on when school may resume. In the meantime, we’re keeping tuned to all official government and school channels and adding what we know to beijingkids' School Updates blog here.

READ: Beijing Adjusts Foreign Quarantine Rules as COVID-19 Spreads Overseas

This article originally appeared on our sister site beijingkids.

Photo: Suhyeon Choi (via Unsplash)