Will HK Lose Expat Teachers Over COVID-19 Quarantine Rules?

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]nternational schools in Hong Kong are shortening their year-end and other breaks to give expatriate staff a longer summer holiday to return home and still meet the city’s strict quarantine requirements.

 
The schools are worried that teachers are unhappy that they could not return home this year because of Covid-19 pandemic restrictions and might resign over the long separation from their families.

The summer holidays are usually six weeks. Many schools are extending next year’s summer break to eight weeks, and this will allow expats to have five weeks of holiday before returning to spend 21 days in quarantine in Hong Kong.

This will allow more time for families to travel and complete quarantine while at the same time ensuring we retain the same number of school days, said Belinda Greer, chief executive officer of the English Schools Foundation (ESF).

The schools are allowed to tweak the length of their breaks provided they meet the Education Bureaus guideline to have no fewer than 190 school days for whole-day schools in an academic year.

ESF runs 22 kindergartens and schools with about 3,000 employees and more than 18,000 students of more than 75 nationalities.

Greer said it reconfigured the school calendar to shorten the Christmas holiday by two weeks and extend the summer holiday to eight weeks.

Hong Kong has seen almost no local coronavirus infections in months under its zero-Covid strategy, but the mandatory 21 days quarantine requirement for travelers from many destinations has effectively shut the city from the outside, even as the rest of the world has begun reopening.

Executive Council convenor Bernard Chan has acknowledged the unhappiness of expat teachers who have not seen their families for a long time and the school’s fears of a possible brain drain.

“I think the issue of talent retention is perhaps quite imminent”, he said last Sunday.

Schools with expatriate teachers told the Post that their turnover rates had stayed stable, but they had come up with measures to prevent the possible loss of expatriate teachers from missing their families.

A spokeswoman for the Education Bureau said it fully understood the desire of the international schools’ foreign teachers to spend their long holidays in their home countries.

But she said the pandemic was still evolving globally, and the bureau appealed to school staff to avoid non-essential travel. Those who feel they must travel will have to follow the city’s prevailing quarantine arrangements.