BHOPAL: School reopening began on a rather glum note in Bhopal on Monday as only government schools opened, to barely 10% attendance, while private ones stayed shut.
The majority of schools affiliated to CBSE and MP Board were closed on Monday. Private school associations have made it clear that it is not possible to open up campuses and incur expenses on sanitization and upkeep for so few students.
The state government has allowed schools to reopen one class at a time, with 50% students coming in once or twice a week. Class 12 physical classes resumed on Monday, and class 11 will reopen on Tuesday.
However, most parents are unwilling to send their children to school when fear of a third Covid wave looms, and a vaccine for children is still awaited. Also, what irked parents is the missing consent forms. The government has made parents’ consent mandatory, but schools that reopened on Monday didn’t send any. Parents were informally asked on WhatsApp to send a written consent. There is no fixed format, and parents want a ‘no’ option on such forms.
Pvt schools assn to meet edu minister
There are 72 CBSE-affiliated private schools, including 26 missionary ones, and 450 affiliated to MP Board in the state capital. Schools that had been demanding reopening of classes stepped back when the government allowed them to do so.
Vinny Raj Modi, vice president of MP Association of Private Unaided Schools, said, “The state government is only thinking about parents. When everything else is open, I fail to understand what is the problem in opening schools. We have decided to meet the education minister and raise our concern. Till then, we are not opening schools.”
The association will present a memorandum to the school education minister in this regard. “We will meet him to apprise him of the ground situation. We also want to open the campuses, but not like this,” he said. Unlike private schools, the government schools in the state capital reopened classes with a low presence of the students on Monday.
