TEHRAN – Smart school network plan will be officially inaugurated on Monday by connecting over 76,000 schools nationwide.

To achieve communication justice to reduce the educational gap between urban and rural students, the first phase of the smart school network plan will be launched.

According to this plan, the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology is obliged, in cooperation with the Ministry of Education, to provide access (hardware-software and content) to textbooks, educational content, tests, and academic counseling, educational computer games, aptitude assessment, technical and social skills free of charge to all students in cities with less than 20,000 people and in villages and suburbs.

All schools will soon be covered by the smart system nationwide.

Education during COVID-19 

All educational centers in Iran were closed in late February due to the coronavirus pandemic, but for students to keep in touch with their studies, the Ministry of Education launched a homegrown mobile application on April 9, called SHAD, providing students with distance learning programs.

Education Minister Mohsen Haji Mirzaei announced that all schools for the new academic year start on September 5. He said urban and rural schools with high population density will be divided into two groups, with attendance diverted into odd-even days. He added that low-density population areas with lower risk will have a normal routine.

A month earlier, over 15 million students attended schools nationwide for the new school year under health protocols.

Each year, Iranian students start the school year on September 23, which marks the first day of autumn on the Iranian calendar, after three-month summer vacation, while this year, in the light of the pandemic, the school year was started 18 days earlier.

This year, education is followed in three forms of in-person, virtual, and television-based, but our priority is school attendance, all schools should strictly follow the health regulations so that the students are protected, Haji Mirzaei said.

Meanwhile, Health Minister Saeed Namaki warned that the third wave of the pandemic has just flared up in the country, as the new cases of coronavirus in Iran hit an all-time high.

So, the officials decided to increase the restrictions and stick to e-learning schools.

In Tehran, it was announced that all recreational, educational, and sports centers will be closed for one week from October 4.

COVID-19 kills over 26,000 in Iran

In the press briefing on Sunday, Health Ministry spokesperson Sima-Sadat Lari confirmed 3,653 new cases of COVID-19 infection, raising the total number of infections to 471,772. She added that 389,966patients have so far recovered, but 4,154 remain in critical conditions of the disease.

In the past 24 hours, 211 patients have lost their lives, bringing the total number of deaths to 26,957, she added.

Lari noted that so far 4,123,173 COVID-19 tests have been conducted across the country.

She said the high-risk “red” zones include provinces of Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, East Azerbaijan, South Khorasan, Semnan, Qazvin, Lorestan, Ardabil, Khuzestan, Kermanshah, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, Gilan, Bushehr, Zanjan, Ilam, Khorasan Razavi, Mazandaran, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Alborz, West Azerbaijan, Markazi, Kerman, North Khorasan, Hamedan, and Yazd.

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