Plans to bring pre-pandemic normalcy to schools across the country in May are being met with both excitement and worry. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Education announced the “back to normal” guidelines that will see schools in Korea resume normal operations beginning May 1. Under the new guidelines, kindergartens, elementary, middle and high schools will reintroduce both academic and extracurricular activities, halting online classes, dropping self-testing routines and arrangin

Education Ministry announces ‘back to normal’ guidelines for schools

More than 20 percent of schools plan to arrange field trips this year

More than 1 in 4 elementary students have experienced greater feelings of depression during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Education Ministry said Wednesday. 　 Korea Research conducted a study on mental health of students in Korea, which ran from Feb. 11 to 18 and involved 341,412 elementary, middle and high school students, under the request of the ministry. While 27 percent of elementary students responded they have become more depressed than compared to before the pandemic, 26.3 percent said

Ministry maintains midterm exam exclusion policy for infected students

One in three students in Korea have contracted COVID-19 since 2020

Taking a step back from its initial decision to ban COVID-19-confirmed students from taking midterms, the Ministry of Education is now looking into allowing them to sit for the exams. The Education Ministry said it is currently reviewing the possibilities of having students with active coronavirus cases take the tests later this month. “We have not decided to allow students who have been ordered into isolation from the disease control authorities to take the midterm exams,“ the m

The Education Ministry’s decision to maintain a ban on students with COVID-19 from taking midterm exams has drawn backlash, with students and parents voicing concerns that missing out on the exams could put them at a disadvantage. “It is rather fortunate that our whole family already had COVID-19,” a high school student who attends a school in northern Seoul said. “It would be frustrating to miss the midterms as I had messed up on the previous one,” said the hig

Ministry says omicron-driven virus peak at schools has passed

COVID outbreak takes toll on students, parents and teachers

Founded in 1973 by Edward Ben Adams, Seoul International School is one of Korea’s oldest international schools. Adams was born in Daegu in 1938, to a missionary family who devoted themselves to education in Korea. As Seoul International School prepares for its 50th anniversary next year, the school hopes to continue its tradition of inspiring students, and upholding its core values for the years to come, says the school’s current head of school, Michael Colaianni. In an interview pre

Korea International School has won the AP Computer Science Female Diversity Award, in recognition of the school’s effort to bring diversity to a program for advanced computer science. The College Board, a nonprofit organization established to expand access to higher education, honored the school’s Design and Innovation Department (D&I) for its near equal gender representation in AP computer science principles courses. Other classes in the department also strive to draw more fem

Schools in Korea are scrambling in confusion as the country’s COVID-19 cases continue to rapidly increase. According to the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, 15,337 students in Seoul were newly confirmed to have COVID-19 between Feb. 28 and Thursday, while 1,417 school faculty members in Seoul were also confirmed. The tally has been on a steep rise. Though there were 2,883 new confirmed cases in students in Seoul on Tuesday, the number rose to 6,240 on Wednesday and 6,214 on Thu

Unvaccinated students living with confirmed COVID-19 patients will be allowed to attend in-person classes staring March 14, as part of the Ministry of Education’s new guidelines announced Monday. Schools will not penalize students’ COVID-19-related absences from the new semester onward. Also, from March 14, students can attend classes in person even if their family member has been infected with COVID-19. The Ministry of Education announced more details to its response against the

Teachers’ unions are voicing out their concerns after the government announced schools will have the choice to provide full remote classes during the first two weeks of March. The Ministry of Education announced Monday that it has designated March 2 -11 to be a new semester adjustment period, allowing schools to hold online-only classes if needed. Previously, the ministry had warned schools to refrain from switching to an online-only class scheme. However, it changed its stance with a s