Education bureau to release further details on lunch provision

THE Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (DSEJ) and educators across Macau are in regular communication in respect to providing lunch to small children under special daycare services, the bureau stated in a reply to the Times.
The Times became aware of the issue when it received an email from a group of readers. In the email, the readers expressed their concerns over lunch for their children under the ‘friendly measure’ employed by the DSEJ, which refers to the special daycare that it has “recommended” schools provide.
Senior secondary education resumed on May 4, while junior secondary levels will start a week later on May 11. Resumption for other education levels is still pending.
In response to this special situation, the DSEJ has instructed schools with children’s facilities to offer daycare services to families with such needs.
In fact, many families have dual working parents with no grandparents or domestic helpers to help take care of small children in their families. As a result, the DSEJ came up with the ‘friendly measure’ idea.
Usually for lunch periods, working parents who cannot retrieve their children from school for lunch, due to either geographical distance or work arrangements, can buy lunch services for their children from their children’s schools or nearby tuition centers.
Not all schools provide lunch services, therefore tuition centers with such services normally fill this gap in the market.. However, according to Macau Daily Times readers, “the DSEJ does not allow tutorial centers to provide lunch services.”
The education regulator indirectly admitted the existence of such conditions at a government daily press conference. Wong Ka Ki, head of the Department of Education at the DSEJ, stated that the bureau would announce further details “at an appropriate time.”
Nonetheless, the readers fear that the issue will deteriorate after the resumption of junior secondary schools, because older children, who might care for their younger siblings, will be at school during daytime, leaving nobody at home to take care of younger children.
The readers hope the DSEJ will ask all schools that provide special daycare services to offer lunch to children or resume meal services at tuition centers.
“Otherwise, the friendly measure will be ironic – it is not friendly at all,” the group of readers wrote. “Working parents who are working far away [or] do not have the same lunch time [as] their kids are helpless [regarding a lunch arrangement].”
With regards to that, Wong said that his bureau has contacted schools that provide daycare services to allow their students to bring simple meals to school for lunch, although the bureau will remain in contact with stakeholders about further arrangements.
This arrangement will allow these children to have their own lunches at schools or tuition centers, depending on where they normally stay during lunchtime. “We’ll try our best to make the arrangements as similar to normal as possible,” Wong said.