Bahk Eun-ji has been with The Korea Times since 2012, building a career across multiple desks. She began at the Business Desk, where she conducted in-depth interviews with key figures in Korea's corporate world. Later, she moved to the Politics & City Desk, focusing on education policy and social affairs. She later served as team leader of the digital content team, leading curation efforts on the newspaper’s homepage and reshaping print stories for social media audiences to enhance digital reach. Now back on the Politics Desk, she covers the National Assembly and the Ministry of National Defense, with a renewed focus on political developments.
Teachers face higher workload amid pandemic
Students wait for a coronavirus test at a makeshift clinic in Oksu Elementary School, where a student was confirmed to be infected with coronavirus in Seoul, Saturday. Yonhap
By Bahk Eun-ji
By Bahk Eun-ji
A teachers' union called on the education authorities Monday to come up with more effective measures for its members who have faced an increased workload due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a statement, the Korean Teachers and Education Workers' Union (KTU) claimed the government should guarantee teachers' right to rest.
“Teachers should be safe first in order to protect students at schools. The Ministry of Education (MOE) should create a system that allows the teachers to take care of their health during this prolonged virus pandemic,” KTU spokeswoman Jung Hyun-jin said. “The Ministry of Education recommends teachers rest if they have any suspicious symptoms, but teachers can't actually take a break.”
The Korean Federation of Teachers' Associations (KFTA) also stated that the education ministry should actively support teachers who have underlying health conditions or who are seeing their health deteriorate by allowing them to reduce class hours or work from home.
“Although the guidelines for COVID-19 were passed down to schools by the education ministry, teachers can easily be confused when a confirmed case is detected because they have never experienced such a situation before. It would be much clearer for teachers if the ministry made checklists for infection control work from existing cases,” said Shin Hyun-wook, the head of the policy department of the KFTA.
Schools don't have enough staff to specifically handle virus prevention among students. What happens instead is that teachers end up handing out guidelines, checking students' temperature and making sure they keep social distancing rules in classrooms.
Kim Ji-hak, chief representative of the Korean Health Teachers Association who is also serving as a nurse-teacher at Siheung Eunhaeng Middle School in Gyeonggi Province, said the clinical data including the treatment process of COVID-19 patients should be shared with the regional educational offices and health teachers so that they can respond promptly.
Teachers complain that the lack of support comes from the fact that schools are less affected by COVID-19 than other places.
In a recent regular briefing, Vice Education Minister Park Baeg-beom said no children had contracted the virus at school. In most cases, they either found out they had been infected with the virus after going to school, or they showed symptoms at school and subsequently tested positive.
The schools' infection control measures such as enforcing the wearing of masks and changing class schedules to avoid overcrowding in schools have reportedly contributed to preventing the infections.
Kim said the MOE should dispatch professional personnel who would exclusively be in charge of infection control work at schools if the pandemic persists.