Skopje, 2 March 2023 (MIA) — Yesterday saw the highest number of bomb alerts in Skopje schools so some receiving a bomb threat for the first time were not ready to move their classes online, Education Minister Jeton Shaqiri told reporters asking how education authorities were addressing complaints from students unable to join their schools’ Microsoft Teams meetings.

“Yesterday was the first day following [the Ministry of Education’s] recommendations given to Skopje schools only. More than 90 percent of these problems are in Skopje,” Minister Shaqiri said. “

So yesterday was the first day we saw these online teaching problems as well as the resulting problems for parents."

“Some of the schools did not expect bomb claims as they had not received any before,” he noted.

Shaqiri also claimed that schools that had received the Ministry of Education’s recommendations Friday and had already accessed the Teams app “had no problem yesterday.”

“Some of the schools that received their first bomb claim yesterday solved these problems in half an hour,” the education minister said, adding his ministry was “against online teaching” but they had made the recommendation for safety reasons.

Shaqiri also told the press he expected from the government to urgently discuss the problems the bomb claims have caused in public schools, especially the problem of parents needing to pick up during work hours their small children evacuated from school.

He said the government needed to come up with a new solution “based on the recommendation of competent institutions since the number of schools reporting [bomb claims] is rising.”

Shaqiri said experiences from other countries would be considered as well.

Asked whether education authorities would recommend that all high schools switch to online classes, he said “it is not an easy decision” whether this should apply to Skopje high schools only or every school across the country.

“We are not rushing to make this decision because we would also need to make such a decision for elementary schools. Because yesterday there were more claims in elementary schools than in high schools,” the education minister said.

Recalling that the bomb threats were being initally sent only to high schools, he noted that “now there are claims in elementary schools as well, which has opened up a new problem.”

Asked to comment on why the bomb threats were being sent to public schools and not private ones, Shaqiri said he was also wondering why the state institutions were the only ones receiving "such bad intentions."

“I’m not saying they [private schools] should also be receiving them but that public ones shouldn’t be either,” the education minister said. mr/