Maharashtra primary schools to reopen from December 1

The Maharashtra cabinet on Thursday gave its nod for restarting physical school for classes 1-7 in the urban areas and 1-4 in the rural areas from December 1. Schools for these students will open for the first time since March 2020.
Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray who recently underwent a cervical spine surgery joined the meeting online from his hospital bed and approved the proposal.
Education minister Varsha Gaikwad said that in the next few days the state government will be holding consultations with all the stakeholders including school management, parents and even the pediatric task force for further fine tuning of the standard operating procedures.
"These students will be returning to the campus for the first time in nearly two years. We want them to feel safe and acclimatise to physical schooling. Primary section children are very small and it may be difficult to ensure that they wear a mask, keep physical distance at all times, but since the pediatric task force was of the opinion that children need to step into the normal world or else many will drop out of the education system and so we decided to open up schools for them as well,"said Gaikwad.

The state government has already allowed offline classes for 8-12 in urban areas and 5-12 in the rural areas. She said that the SOP's issued for the senior classes were detailed and most of them may be replicated again.
The pediatric task force that had cleared the proposal and had said that there is no need for the state to link reopening of schools with vaccination for under 18. A group of parents from Mumbai who had started a petition online and had written to the CM Uddhav Thackeray urging the state to open up schools for all classes including pre-primary. " We welcome the state's decision to start primary schools, but we also want the pre-primary schools to open up as well. Also, the issue of SOP's should be left for the school and the parents to work out,"said Gayatri Sabharwal, one of the petitioners.