It has been a hectic week that started with a marathon of school and college prize-giving ceremonies and graduations.

And more educational institutions are scheduled to wrap up in similar fashion this coming week, closing the curtain on an unpredictable and disruptive year for students, teachers and parents alike.

Talk to the staff of the various schools and colleges and you will hear familiar stories of COVID-19 lockdowns, suspended or cancelled classes, testing positive for the virus, and teachers working with their students and their parents to overcome these numerous challenges, by ensuring that the learning process continues through alternative online learning platforms.

Students in schools and colleges that were quick off the blocks and identified alternative online learning platforms – amid the chaos that came with the rise in COVID-19 infections following the detection of the country’s first community transmission case in March this year – were able to come through the pandemic uncscathed.

There were a number of personal testimonies this week by students at their graduation, who due to their resilience and the timely support of their teachers and family members, were able to work around their hurdles and complete the academic year ticking the last box of their secondary education.

Even teachers were up against the wall, forced to immediately make changes to their mode of delivering their Monday-Friday lessons in a classroom setting, to a virtual room accessed through online platforms such as Moodle or Google Classroom which their pupils accessed using laptops or workstations while at home.

A Samoa Observer interview after the graduation last Wednesday with the Robert Louis Stevenson School Deputy Principal, Priscilla Davidson Betham, gives you an insight on the kind of challenges that teachers faced this year.

“Very eventful year with all the lockdown and all the different changes in the education system, TVET programs [and] national exams all pushed towards the end [of year] so this was a real push to try and get everything completed before this Friday,” Ms. Betham said.

“It’s been really hard for our students, we did have classes, we did have online classes, we did Google Classroom as well Study Ladder.

“We haven’t done the Moodle but we will look into that next year, otherwise it has been a real struggle, hard trying to get the kids back into school, and trying to get them all hyped up wanting to learn because a lot of kids did not want to come back.”

But not all schools in Samoa would have had access to online learning platforms during the pandemic this year or even the electronic devices to access them. It is likely that the further away your school is from Apia, your ability to access learning resources for your students during the pandemic would have become more difficult.

Nonetheless, we can only be thankful that the teachers stuck to their guns and didn’t throw in the towel, despite the added challenges that they had to navigate as Ms. Betham mentioned in her interview with this newspaper.

In fact there were cases this year of teachers in a number schools in Samoa testing positive for COVID-19, consequently forcing them into isolation to lead to the abandoning of classes for an indefinite period.

Will the Ministry of Education Sports and Culture (MESC) run a survey now that the school year has ended to determine how many teachers in Samoa were actually affected by COVID-19 and how it impacted their output as teachers?

What was the direct effect of the pandemic on a school’s teaching staff and the learning outcomes of the children who were enrolled in that educational institution?

And how do teachers feel about their profession and the new challenges that were brought on by the pandemic in terms of their day-to-day classroom lessons?

We believe the onset of the school holiday period opens the door for the MESC to run the proposed survey, in order to determine how the pandemic has affected Samoa’s teaching profession, if they are ready for the 2023 academic year, and offer recommendations that would assist the Ministry prepare them for a new school year post-pandemic.

The country appreciates the contribution of our teachers this year, for being steadfast in the face of a public health crisis, but just like any other citizen they were also vulnerable during the pandemic and any assistance the Ministry can render to prepare them for next year would be the right thing to do.