AHMEDABAD: In a knee-jerk reaction, the Gujarat government on Saturday announced closure of all government, aided and private schools across the state till further notice owing to rapid spread of Covid. The decision was taken by the state’s core committee on Covid-19 on Saturday.
The announcement comes 16 days after the government ordered schools within eight municipal corporations to stop operations on March 18. While children have been asked to stay away, the government has not offered any relief for teachers. “Teachers may have to continue to come to school,” says secretary primary and secondary education secretary Vinod Rao. Of the 36,000 schools in the state, 25,000 were operational in various districts including those in small towns and villages.
When asked how many children or teachers were infected in various rural and town schools, Rao said, “We don’t maintain any such data.” An Ahmedabad-based teacher Tejal Patel asked, “Don’t we teachers have families and children at home who may get infected? Also, if the government has no data for Covid spread in schools and among children, on what basis are they taking the closure decisions.”
Digvijay Jadeja, president of the Gujarat primary schoolteachers association claims, “More than 2,000 teachers, a majority of them being government primary schoolteachers, have been infected with Covid after schools reopened. The government could be more vigilant and act, since it has access to all disease data and infections from across the state.”
Members of a few parents’ association in Ahmedabad had recently complained to the DEO how schools continued to call their children to school in regular clothes even as the government had restricted schools from functioning.
Earlier, the state government had decided to reopen schools for students of Classes 6 to 8 from February 18, after being shut down for almost 11 months owing to the Covid pandemic. “But rapid rise of the pandemic necessitated closure of the schools,” said a senior education department official.