According to the notification, ashramshalas staff would have to visit localities within five to seven-kilometre radius from their school and impress upon students the need to return home every day rather than stay at these residential schools to ensure social-distancing.

The State Tribal Development department, through a government notification issued Friday, has directed teaching and non-teaching staff at ashramshalas — residential schools for tribal students — to start reporting for work starting June 15. While staffers from Nashik and Thane divisions had been asked to re-join work from June 15, their counterparts in Amravati and Nagpur divisions would begin work from June 26.

According to the notification, ashramshalas staff would have to visit localities within five to seven-kilometre radius from their school and impress upon students the need to return home every day rather than stay at these residential schools to ensure social-distancing, essential to flatten the Covid-19 curve, can be maintained in these schools. Dates for the reopening of ashramshalas, it said, would be announced in the next few days.

To ensure that the pandemic did not hamper the education of tribal students, the department has also directed teaching and non-teaching staff to ensure subject-wise textbooks for the 2010-21 academic year reach students through home distribution. Until every student starts attending schools, the department has asked school management committees, local representatives, department officials and NGOs to keep in touch with the students and help them in academic and health matters. All staff members have also been told to fill the vacant seats as well as complete the admission for the new academic year through coordination with the affiliated gram panchayats.

Since students of classes IX to XI have been promoted in view of the pandemic, the new academic syllabus would be precise and strict to help them overcome challenges later, the notification said. It added that all teachers would also have to undergo a medical check-up before schools begin.

Meanwhile, school management committees have also been directed to work on using classrooms among others rooms in a school building for the purpose of turning them into dormitories for students since additional space might be required in the wake of social-distancing norms. They would have to ensure that students wash hands every hour, and after each sports activity, on coming to and leaving the hostels, the notification said.

The ashramshalas, which are currently being used as isolation centres, would be sanitised by the district administration and health department, it said. The department is also set to release new guidelines disallowing visiting parents to enter the school premises.