After being recessed for more than a month Armenian schools reopened Monday (January 11) after being shut down (December 8) during a flu epidemic, followed by the two-week New Year holiday.

The Ministry of Health of Armenia (MOH) says the number of influenza cases has decreased to manageable level, but urges precautions through the winter.

On the suggestion of chief epidemiologist Ara Asoyan, the Ministry of Education closed schools when attendance decreased by 30 percent due to the spread of seasonal flu. (There are 450,000 schoolchildren in Armenia.) Concerns over the spread of ‘swine flu’ in Armenia also prompted the closure of schools. According to the recent data of the MOH, up to now 111 cases (including three death cases) of A H1N1 virus confirmed by a laboratory have been registered in Armenia. Currently two patients are being treated at medical prophylactic institutions. The others were discharged from hospitals after recovery.

As Narine Hovhannisyan, Head of the General Education Department of the Ministry of Science and Education of Armenia, told ArmeniaNow, from today all schools working with a five-day regime, will pass to a six-day regime, and as for the schools already working with a six-day regime, the academic hours will increase. Schoolchildren, because of the forced vacation, will be deprived of their two-week spring holidays. Only first-grade schoolchildren will have a rest for a week in spring.

“According to my estimations, it will be possible to fill up the missed lessons by March,” Hovhannisyan says, adding that schools in Yerevan and all provinces of Armenia have already started running normally.

Varduhi Melikyan, a mother of three schoolchildren, believes that even though the vacation has been a need (because her children were also sick), however, now it will be harder to catch up on their lessons.

“The lessons will be even more overloaded. That is why I am sure that it will be very difficult for three of them,” Melikyan says.

Unlike schools, kindergartens, which are under the control of Yerevan’s municipality, will remain closed due in part to the fact that only 56 out of 162 kindergartens of Yerevan have central heating systems.