The Impact of Measures During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Education Sector: The Experience of Slovakia

. The paper is focused on the analysis of the development of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the education of students in Slovakia in the context of managing distance education and reopening schools and making other strategic decisions in this field. The starting materials are legally binding documents and strategic documents to combat the COVID-19 pandemic considering specific anti-pandemic measures and recommendations in the school environment and data on the positivity of pupils and school staff from particular national authorities with an impact on the classroom and school closures and the transition to distance education. The aim of the paper is to clarify current legislation and other strategic documents regulating the anti-pandemic management system in schools and through data analysis to determine whether the overall maintenance of full-time education during the pandemic affects its development and whether the school closure positively or negatively affects the pandemic. Within the information processing, several methods of analysis of materials, data, and legislative documents are applied, as well as practical knowledge and experience from the education sector. The main findings of the paper are planning during a pandemic is problematic due to different behaviors of variants, and schools and regional public health authorities can independently decide, within their competence, to close schools, but the effectiveness of these decisions is questionable in terms of the development of COVID-19. The main output of the paper is an evaluation of the effectiveness of the implementation of anti-pandemic measures in the education sector in the Slovak Republic.