High school students and teachers in South Australian schools will be required to wear masks when they return to classrooms after the state's COVID–19 lockdown ends tonight.
Key points:
- SA's lockdown will end tonight, but some restrictions will remain in place
- Sporting competition will still be banned but not training to limit the exposure of people from different parts of the community
- Masks will be required in high schools unless it hampers the instruction process
Police Commissioner Grant Stevens said the new requirement would not apply to primary school students, but would be enforced in high schools unless it interfered with the education process.
"SA Health are working directly with [the Department for] Education on that so we can get the mix right, so kids can still learn but they can do so safely, and teachers can be as safe as possible too in the same circumstances," he said.
Department for Education chief executive Rick Persse clarified that students in year 8 and above — when high school starts in South Australia — would have to wear masks while indoors.
Teachers would have to wear masks in all grades apart from when actually teaching, he said.
He said the requirement came after a discussion with Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier yesterday.
"We're just loyally implementing it," he said.
Early education and special schools would be exempt from the rule, Mr Persse said, and exemptions would be made for students and staff with health issues.
"We expect over the next 24 hours or so it'll be a bit of an adjustment for all secondary schools to get this going, and we won't have 100 per cent compliance straight away," he said.
Australian Education Union state secretary Lara Golding said the union was "keen to talk to the government about the details of what this is going to look like".
Getty Images: Scott Barbour
)South Australian Secondary Principals' Association president Peter Mader said he accepted the necessity of the requirement.
"We implement every day a rule around school uniform and essentially what's being asked … is there's an additional garment to be worn as part of that uniform," he said.
"It's specified for a very good health reason."
People aged 12 and over were required to wear masks while in public — apart from while exercising — during South Australia's seven-day COVID–19, which ends at midnight tonight.
Sport training to resume
Mr Stevens also announced this morning that sport training would be allowed but not competition, following a meeting yesterday afternoon.
Competitive sport and gyms were banned altogether during the lockdown.
The AFL will not return to Adelaide this weekend, he said.
Premier Steven Marshall yesterday said an announcement on sport would be made today.
Mr Stevens explained the reason why training could resume but not competitive sport.
"The difference is if you're training, you're training with people you're normally in contact with, but when you allow teams to compete, they invariably come from different parts of the wider metropolitan area or different country locations to compete together, so you're bringing different communities together, which means if we do have an outbreak the potential spread is much wider than if you have it just in a group of people who normally get together," he said.
Gyms can reopen but with only one person per 8 square metres.
ABC News
)Mr Marshall yesterday said there was still a chance the lockdown could continue if there were "further unlinked cases tomorrow".
He also said an announcement would be made about events attracting more than 1,000 people.
Mr Stevens, the state coordinator during the coronavirus pandemic, said he had not had "any negative input so things are still looking really good for midnight tonight".
Nineteen cases were linked with the cluster that started last Monday with an elderly man arriving at the Modbury Hospital with COVID-19 symptoms.
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2021-07-26 22:32:36Z
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