Maharashtra: Reopening indecision puts schools & families on edge

PUNE: The confusion over reopening of schools has left institutions, students and parents fretting over planning of classes.
Last week, education minister Varsha Gaikwad had announced that in-person classes would commence in rural areas for students from Standard V to VIII and classes will be held for students from Stds VIII to XII. SOPs were issued on Tuesday for the reopening.
But on Wednesday, health minister Rajesh Tope said the task force members were opposed to reopening schools as they were apprehensive about students not being vaccinated and sought to avoid any kind of risk.
Schools said they were just getting ready to reopen with all the safety norms, scheduling shifts of staff and facilitating arrangements for reopening, and the decision to not reopen has taken them by surprise.
Parents and students said their planning had collapsed with respect to managing the transportation and their work from home timings.
At the same time, education activists said the government should have better coordination between themselves regarding the reopening and announce it only after proper planning.
Director of a school in Nigdi, on the condition of anonymity, said, “We had just started to sanitise the school, get ready for signboards, had given the board for printing, put up a detailed schedule for staff considering alternate attendance and many other preparations. All of a sudden, we are now told the schools won’t reopen putting a break on all our preparations and causing financial loss.”
Spokesperson of the Aam Aadmi Party Party, Pune unit, Mukund Kirdat, said there is no coordination between the task force and the ministers. “The education department announced it would reopen and the government instructed them to cancel the decision in two days. The guidelines drafted by the education department were also very weak and the entire responsibility was shouldered upon the local governments and the education commissioner,” he added.
Others said the government did not seem serious about improving vaccination nor was it taking strong steps to improve education-related issues, curriculum, evaluation which was very shocking and frustrating for the parents of students.
A parent of a Std VIII student, Ashima Choudhary, said, “The moment we start preparing to take decisions regarding sending our daughter to school there is a change. It is so frustrating to schedule and reschedule things as we are already working from home and have our office schedules fixed. The planning by the government is extremely poor.”