I am covering trend, food and fashion. Previously, I covered diplomacy, city, environment and unification.
School closures baffle working parents
Elementary school students in Busan wear masks during class, Tuesday, as a precautionary measure against Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). / Yonhap
By Kim Se-jeong
By Kim Se-jeong
For Jang Boon-nam, 54, a Seoul resident, the spread of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is worrisome primarily because of her seven-year-old grandson.
Jang lives with her daughter who is a single parent. Both adults work, including weekends, and the two panicked when his kindergarten notified them it would be temporarily closed from June 4 due to the MERS outbreak.
“I didn’t want it to be closed because both my daughter and I work and no one can take care of my grandson, “Jang said. “But, it closed because other parents wanted it to.”
Working as a clerk at a public parking lot in western Seoul, she had to rearrange all of her weekly schedule so that she could stay home with her grandson when his mother was at work. Her daughter works as a teacher at a local hagwon, a private academic institute, and changing her working time was not feasible.
Jang said she somehow managed to find a solution. Sometimes, she took the child to work and left him at the paid children’s playground in Home plus, next to her work for a couple of hours.
“The playground helped me a lot, but he didn’t like it so much because it was always new faces there,” Jang said. The kindergarten reopened on Tuesday and she is now more relaxed. But, it was undoubtedly a frustrating time for her.
“What good is it for? The kindergarten closed down for the children’s health, but I feel my grandson suffered more because it shut.”
Jang’s frustration is shared among many households where both caregivers work. A lot have expressed the sense of hopelessness faced with a decision to leave their children alone at home while they go to work amid a crisis like the MERS outbreak.
As of Tuesday, the deadly respiratory disease prompted more than 2,000 schools and kindergartens across the country to shut down temporarily. Of the 95 MERS cases confirmed so far, only one has involved a child--a high school student who contracted the disease at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul.
Of the closed schools, elementary schools are the highest in number with 987, followed by 682 kindergartens, 292 middle schools and 183 high schools. Nineteen universities also shut their doors.
More than half of these schools are located in Gyeonggi Province where most of the initial cases were reported. Seoul and Daejeon follow Gyeonggi.
Parents with older children are equally worried that having no school could make them waste their time in PC or karaoke rooms or even fall victim to crime.
Social media outlets were filled with outcries from frustrated parents.
“What does the government want us to do if only the schools are closed? This idiot solution makes me feel sorry for my child,” one user with ID didi**** wrote on Naver, a popular web portal.
“This is the fate of working parents in Korea. Let’s be optimistic,” wrote another with id bmy9****. One expressed concern for older children. “Teenagers in a PC room? That sounds like a perfect place to contract the MERS virus.”