Skopje, 10 January 2022 (MIA) – The Support for Online Classes Movement, which started as a Facebook group that now has 15,000 members, demands that the second term of the 2021/22 schoolyear be held online. “We’re incapable of organizing blended learning, we can’t even do in-person classes because kids in a 30-40 square meter classroom transmit the virus very quickly. Not only do we throw our kids in the fire, we also jeopardize their entire families,” Ana Gligorova, representative of the movement, told reporters on Monday. She appealed to the Minister of Health, the Minister of Education and Science, as well as the Infectious Diseases Committee to ask the government to realize this request. “Everyone, and I mean everyone, is catching the new strain. We believe that schools didn’t follow protocols in the first term, kids were becoming infected in November and it was all kept under wraps, some kids who followed classes online were bullied or excluded by certain teachers. We have a case of a child, a sixth-grader whose constitutional right to an education was taken away from them during the entirety of the first term. Their father is now taking legal action. There is a huge number of people who want online classes in the second term due to the health risks in this country,” Gligorova said. The right to an education, she said, is a constitutional right, and some laws have been broken. “We’re dealing with an uptick in positive Covid cases, therefore, we think we don’t have the conditions for in-person classes in small classrooms, not following protocols, not testing students and staff, open windows in winter which can endanger the lives of many families in a short amount of time,” the Support for Online Classes Movement said. dk/ba/