This Saraswati puja the collective prayer on the lips of almost all students, teachers and parents is for schools to reopen.
Most in-person classes have been off since March 2020, although classes IX to XII had got state permission to open at intervals when the Covid surge was low. Currently with the education department weighing options to resume in-person sessions for all classes, most stakeholders seem to lend their support.
Face to face
“Students can shop at malls, visit the zoo, eat at restaurants but they can’t go to school!” DL Block’s Mayukh Majumdar remarks at the irony. He has two daughters in Class XII and VIII and cannot wait for them to resume physical classes.
“My elder daughter shifted schools for her plus-two and though she’ll be graduating in a couple of months, she hardly got to meet her new classmates. No sports, no interactions… She and I have both recovered from a bout of Covid and frankly, it didn’t affect us much. So there’s really no excuse or point in keeping them away from school any longer. And high school students are even vaccinated now.”
The government has not announced vaccines for junior school children yet. “But the disease has already spread throughout the community.We can’t stay locked in at home to prevent its spread,” said Camelia Islam, a teacher at Lake Town Government Sponsored Girls’ High School.
“My eight-year-old son keeps asking when his school would reopen. We may get reinfected but we have to accept that possibility and carry on,” said Jaideep Dhar of BA Block in New Town.
Teachers are worried that children are not developing social skills. “In school, we celebrate several occasions — Republic Day, Independence Day, Saraswati Puja — which students help to organise. Sitting at home they don’t learn to work as a team as most parents believe that the child must not be allowed to do any housework. So behavioural nuances such as organisational skills, social skills and team spirit do not develop,” said Debasis Bhattacharya, a teacher at Narain Das Bangur Memorial Multipurpose School in Bangur Avenue.
Some parents and teachers point out how schools had reopened in different countries and even in some states of India. “Classes have resumed across Maharashtra for classes I to XII from Monday. Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka made an attempt to reopen till the third wave forced them to close. I visited Odisha recently and saw tribal children attending school in Koraput. Are our children immunologically weaker than all of them?” asks principal of The Newtown School Satabdi Bhattacharjee.
Though the level of online teaching, she said, was adequate, she is apprehensive about the damage the enforced break has caused in their holistic development. “They are losing the habit of writing. The smaller ones have got so used to being at home with parents that they are likely to be wailing again when they resume school. They will again need time to acclimatise,” she said.
She also is worried about a child’s mental state at having to be under the eagle eyes of parents round the clock. “Children need some latitude to be themselves. The whispered conversations with a friend during class, a shared joke, a bit of procrastination while doing a task — all this is a part of their childhood. At home, they are constantly being pulled up for the smallest of faults,” she said.
A student of St Francis Xavier School getting vaccinated
Parents’ dilemma
In many cases, with work from home ending in many offices, parents don’t know where to leave their kids when they go to work now. Previously they could simply drop them off at school while heading to office. Now they are having to drop them off at their grandparents’ place or hire paid help to mind the wards.
“The trouble is that if students face technical issues in such cases, neither the grandparents nor the hired help are tech savvy enough to help them,” says a Bangur Avenue resident who teaches in a south Kolkata school. “There have been times when the child has not been able to connect to the audio or video and no one at home has been able to help them. This way they have missed deadlines for projects or worksheet submissions,” she says.
Even if the parents are home, they might not be able to attend to the child. “My husband is an IT professional and is working from home while I run a boutique. When we both have important meetings, to keep our twin daughters occupied we switch the TV on. They are getting addicted to cartoons,” said Gopa Basu, a resident of Sankalpa 4 in New Town’s CB Block. She also wants schools to reopen so that the sisters can take swimming lessons at DPS Newtown. “It is an essential exercise for them as they were born prematurely.”
Madhumita Guha, principal of St. Stephen’s Public School in AE Block, cannot emphasise the need to reopen schools enough. “Hundred per cent of our parents want to send their wards to school, even if it’s once or twice a week,” she says. Besides oft-quoted reasons like the lack of concentration and social interaction while studying in isolation at home, Guha said parents needed their time back.
“Ours is a primary school and the little ones are often unable to follow the teachers’ instructions and so guardians are forced to sit with them during classes. This eats into the time the adults would spend doing chores. As a result they are doing chores in the evenings instead of helping the kids out with homework as they would previously do,” she says.
To compensate, some parents are helping children cheat in exams. “The kids in turn are becoming all the more casual about studies believing that if they don’t know an answer, their parents will cover for them. For damage control, there is no option but for physical classes to resume,” Guha explains.
For the sake of studies
Academics have certainly suffered due to a lack of physical classes.
Learning hasn’t been thorough, students have been cheating in exams and many have even dropped out of schools.
Earlier this week the Bengal government announced a community-based schooling system Paray Shikshalaya, where primary school students will be taught in the open till schools are safe to return to. The objective is to wean back students who may have dropped out of school over the past two years.
“It is an excellent idea if it can be properly implemented. This will work as a counselling programme to prepare children to return to school. We are already teaching about 120 children from disadvantaged backgrounds. About a dozen of our teacher-volunteers are ready to step in if any help is needed to run the programme in New Town which has ample government-owned open spaces,” said Samaresh Das, chairman of New Town Forum & News, which is working in conjunction with another social welfare body called Cenergy on primary education and vocational training.
The residents’ welfare body had collected 1,200 signatures in just four days with an appeal to open schools addressed to the chief minister, the chief secretary and the education minister through the portal change.org.
A senior official of the district administration said they would get in touch with local municipal bodies to arrange for the infrastructure. “We are doing habitation-wise mapping of government primary school students, up to class IV and V. The spaces identified should be accessible to all and have basic infrastructure. The school education department has given us a timeline for every step. We need to speak to the guardians as well. The programme will roll out from February 7,” he said. “We will take help from NGOs and self-help groups as well.”
There is no such directive for the private schools, though.
Things have been all the more difficult for special schools. “We have been trying to teach online but neither do all families have smart phones nor is it possible to communicate adequately to hearing-impaired students through tiny screens,” says Swati Chakraborty Dutta, teacher in-charge secretary of CF Block’s Ideal School for the Deaf.
Their school has students of up to Class VIII and so they have never been allowed to open during the pandemic. “The parents come to pick up mid-day meal rations and they are pleading with us to open up,” she says.
A student of Hariyana Vidya Mandir gets vaccinated on campus.
Ready to open
Most high schools have some experience of operating physical classes during the pandemic and are ready to reopen. “We were ready to open from January 3 but then the semi-lockdown order got issued,” says Sanghamitra Banerjee, principal of Hariyana Vidya Mandir. “If we get the nod today we can open tomorrow. At least the senior students deserve one pen-and-paper exam before sitting for their Boards.” Last week the school vaccinated about 1,800 teenagers too.
Saltlake Shiksha Niketan in Sector V is also done and dusted with their vaccination drive. “Students are now ready and in need for some physical classes before their Board exams. Saraswati puja is an auspicious occasion for students after which it seems appropriate to resume physical classes for senior students. Junior classes can resume in a phase-wise manner thereafter, with pre-schools from the new session in April,” says Rekha Vaisya, academic director.
St Francis Xavier School too is counting the days till they are allowed to open.
Kakali Biswas, a teacher at CJ Block’s Begum Rokeya Smriti Balika Vidyalaya, feels classes IX to XII should start immediately but that she isn’t so sure about the younger ones. “Class I students have no experience of coming to school. Can they adjust to five day classes at once? Maybe they should come twice a week initially to gauge the situation,” she says.
But she also asks one to examine logistics. “We have spoken to the car pool agencies that used to ferry our students but they will face losses if asked to serve only classes IX to XII. Since ours is a government school, our senior students have cycles under the Sabuj Sathi scheme and most of them can cycle to school. But what about the younger ones? Can working parents come to drop their kids off every day?” Biswas wonders.
Students of Saltlake Shiksha Niketan are seated at a distance from one another in the waiting space before getting jabbed
Not so fast
“My children’s school hasn’t arranged for their vaccination yet and in any case, it is no cure to Covid,” says Arvind Kumar Singh, a Kestopur resident whose twins are in Class XII of Salt Lake Point School. “If the authorities allow classes and most students agree to go to school, my children will have to follow suit. But I don’t think it’s safe in the middle of the third wave.”
A Class I teacher of a Sector III school agrees. “It will be terrible to ask five-year-olds to go to school in the middle of a pandemic. Since January I have had several of them falling ill and being unable to resume classes for one or two weeks thereafter. If forced, they are crying or even vomiting during online classes,” observes the teacher, one of whose students even got hospitalised with Covid complications last week. “If kids are getting Covid within four walls, how much more exposure will they have to brace for if made to travel to school?”
A mother of a 12-year has got quite cosy with the study-from-home format. “My daughter is restless to resume school but I don’t see how she’ll get time for her art, music and other extra curricular activities after travelling to and from her school in New Town. “The whole family was saving time not having to wake up early and get her ready for school and drop her off at the bus stop,” says the Sector I lady.
Bhattacharjee, the principal of The Newtown School, points to this section of guardians which is throwing a spanner in the works. “The last time when we opened for classes X and XII, we got a barrage of protesting mails, including some that said if a child got Covid after attending school they would hold the school responsible and demand the cost of treatment from us! Mind you, the student would have attended school for five hours a day and we’d have no idea where he was spending the other 19 hours! They even refused to let their wards take the pre-Board exams offline.”
She feels the real reason is both students and guardians getting used to a relaxed lifestyle. “The students are either suffering from exam phobia or are used to the easy way of scoring marks. So they throw tantrums whenever there is talk of offline exam. The guardians have to wake up early to get the child ready. They have got used to the easy lifestyle.”
But she points out their number has reduced to about 25 per cent now. “Most guardians want schools to reopen.”
Additional reporting by Showli Chakraborty and Sudeshna Banerjee
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