‘Education Ministry in field with all capacity’

MALATYA

The Education Ministry is in the quake zone with all its personnel, Minister Mahmut Özer has said, noting that their priority is to enable children to overcome this trauma with psychosocial support.

“We are a large family with 19 million students and 1.2 million teachers. We do not normalize anything without normalizing education. We are trying to take all the steps that need to be taken for our children’s future so that they can survive these processes in a healthier way,” Özer told daily Milliyet.

Underlining that the priority of the ministry is now to provide psychosocial support to children, Özer stated that so far, 131 preschool, 18 primary and 12 secondary school education tents have been set up for this purpose.

The ministry set up 412 psychological support tents in all tent areas in the 10 provinces, Özer noted, adding that 5,000 experts provide support not only to children in these tents, but also other citizens.

“We bring our children together with their teachers and friends wherever we can find them in tents, containers and prefabricated schools.”

“Although there is a break in education in the quake-hit region, training is continuing in these tents. In short, we will continue our education by producing dynamic solutions under every changing condition,” Özer explained.

Özer stated that they allocated the capacity in the production centers in vocational high schools and public education centers for the needs in the earthquake-affected provinces.

In the first week, they mainly produced soup, hot meals and bread and delivered them to citizens.

“By increasing the production capacity every day, we have now reached a daily production capacity of 2 million hot meals and 1.8 million loaves of bread,” Özer explained.

Touching upon the classes that will be opened in hospitals for children whose treatments are ongoing, Özer stated that so far, they have created classes in 73 hospitals in 10 cities.

“The first priority in hospital classrooms is to deliver educational services without causing an interruption in the education of our children who are still receiving treatments. This service filled an important gap. We will offer this service in all hospitals in 10 provinces until March 1,” Özer expressed.

Pointing out that the ministry also participated in the search and rescue efforts in addition to the psychological support and food and shelter services, Özer added that 5,000 teachers who had previously received search and rescue training were also in the field.