Our plan is for Everest to remain online for now. We will safely open our doors in 2021 and will carefully begin face-to-face classes again. As you can read below our decision to remain online is based on the best interests, health and safety of our students and staff.
The current situation
As you know, Covid-19 continues to be a major source of concern both in Ireland and globally. Weighing up the risks and the benefits of reopening our school at this time has been a very difficult and very serious task for us. We want you to know that above all else the health and safety of our students and staff has been our number one priority in every decision that we have made.
With this in mind, we have decided not to reopen face to face classes, and to keep running all of our classes online for the coming months. We will continue to monitor the situation in other schools and in the wider community. We will, of course, keep you updated on any such decision.
Why we are staying online for now
We have spent a lot of time working through different scenarios for how Everest could reopen safely and from our perspective there are still significant barriers to us doing so. These include:
- Risks to our students and staff – we are not prepared to be the litmus test for how Covid-19 will behave in schools, especially in adult settings like language schools. We feel that over the next few months we will be able to learn from what happens in other similar settings and use the experiences of universities and other adult education centres to ensure that we develop robust protocols for Everest.
- Rates of infection – we have concerns about recurrent spikes in cases and for the outbreaks that are likely to happen throughout the winter and we are not prepared to put our staff or students at risk.
- Future lockdowns – we believe that it is prudent to expect future lockdowns, be they school specific, local or national. We feel that the disruption caused to your language education by opening and closing again would be far greater than remaining online for the time being.
- International travel – for the moment we feel that it is against the interest of public health to encourage international travel into Ireland.
- Travel within Europe – At present there is very restricted travel in and out of Ireland, even from within Europe. This is likely to continue throughout 2021. If we remain online students who cannot travel to Ireland can join the classes, whereas if we reopen this will not be an option for many students.
We know that this news will come as a disappointment to some of you and that you may be missing the structure, routine and social aspects of physically coming to school each day. We are feeling this too. We really miss seeing you all and the sense of community that being together in the building brings.
We will re-open our door in 2021 when it is safe to do so
As always, if you have any questions, doubts or feedback please do not hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely,
Anne-Marie, Rob, and the Everest team
Directors of Everest Language School
