No extended summer holidays, private schools will resume online classes

Gurgaon: A majority of private schools in the city have decided to resume operations with online classes despite a state government order extending summer vacation in schools till June 30.
In a recent order, the government had asked both state-run and private schools to extend the vacation, most of the private schools have started with the sessions while others will follow suit in the next few days.
The private schools, which had called for an early summer vacation this year after the government’s directives in April, are now planning to re-establish normalcy in their academic calendar.
They have argued that the recent orders regarding the extension are primarily to discourage the physical presence of students and teachers in the school premises but there is no prohibition on resuming academic activities virtually.
“When the Covid-19 situation flared up, we had decided to call for early summer break in April. We resumed our sessions from June 7 as per our revised academic calendar for this year. For now, we are only going ahead with our online classes and we aren’t calling students or staff to the school,” said Neena Kaul, director, Heritage Xperiential Learning Schools.
The schools have argued that the tragedy that rolled in the past two months had disconnected students and deprived them of their social circle.
Moreover, private schools were increasingly getting requests from parents to resume the online ‘contact’ classes and cut short the prolonged period of isolation, which in turn could be detrimental for the emotional wellbeing.
“With kids sitting idle and nothing much happening around, parents were anxious that this isolation might have an adverse impact on the children. Moreover, classes will be held online for a few hours every day,” said Arti Chopra, principal of Amity International School in Sector 46.
Schools have asserted that no student will be called to campus until further notice from the government and the online classes will only be for short durations.
“We started online contact classes from Monday. These aren't like regular classes and the basic idea of resuming these classes is to provide these kids with a source of social and emotional engagement with other students and teachers,” said Salwan Public School principal Rashmi Mallik.
“Schools are not just limited to academics; it’s a community and constitutes social circle of students. We’ve been interacting with them and realised that we need to resume our online classes. We also have our online counselling sessions to help these kids come out of the tragic experiences during the second Covid wave,” she added.