JEDDAH: Doorstep deliveries of school textbooks to the homes of thousands of Saudi students have been made in readiness for the new semester. With many students forced to work remotely due to preventive measures aimed at stopping the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), education officials throughout the Kingdom have been busy preparing for the next term. In Hafr Al-Batin, in Eastern Province, the general directorate of education organized home delivery of course reading materials to 104,517 students in all grades from 519 schools. The schools followed an online delivery schedule which included contacting student guardians to notify them of when books were due to arrive. Two similar initiatives were carried out in Jazan by its general education directorate, one sending out textbooks to 541 disabled students and the other dispatching books to 211 students with terminal illnesses. While Saudi schools continue to prepare for the initial seven weeks of remote learning of the new school year, education departments in the Kingdom have been running workshops and training seminars to update teaching staff. Tabuk’s general director of education, Ibrahim Al-Omri, on Tuesday launched a regional training program to help teachers utilize skills on the Madrasati (my school) e-learning management platform for those in education positions. “Your training and enrichment with the platform will benefit teachers, students, families, and all members of the educational system, and I have confidence in all colleagues to be up to the task,” said Al-Omri. The scheme aims to train more than 20,000 education employees before the start of the school year and is also being administered in Madinah and several other Saudi cities, offering 96 training programs until Sept. 13. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia recorded 31 new COVID-19-related deaths on Tuesday, taking the total number of people who had so far died from the disease in the Kingdom to 3,722. There were 1,114 new cases reported in the country, meaning 309,768 people had now contracted COVID-19, with 22,114 active cases and 1,639 patients in a critical condition. According to the Ministry of Health, 74 of the newly recorded cases were in Makkah, with 56 in Jazan, and 54 in Jeddah. In addition, officials said 1,044 more patients had recovered from COVID-19, raising the total number of recoveries in the Kingdom to 283,932. The Kingdom has so far conducted 4,792,192 polymerase chain reaction tests, with 58,707 checks carried out over the last 24-hour period. In Taif, the Ministry of Health’s Taakad (make sure) service helped with 11,966 tests. The service functions as a COVID-19 testing hub for people with no or only mild symptoms of the disease, along with those who think they may have been in contact with an infected individual.