Early to school will help outwit rising mercury

With the Commonwealth Games eating into their summer vacation, the Capital’s students will have to endure a little more of the scorching season in their classrooms, reports Ritika Chopra.

With the Commonwealth Games eating into their summer vacation, the Capital’s students will have to endure a little more of the scorching season in their classrooms.

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But private schools are keen on providing them some respite from the soaring temperatures.

Though temperatures have been on the decline, schools in the Capital and NCR, anticipating hotter weeks ahead, have changed their working hours.

Branches of Modern School (Barakhamba and Vasant Vihar) for instance, have rescheduled their classes half-an-hour earlier in the morning and decided to close an hour earlier in the afternoon. The two schools, which introduced this change on Thursday, will follow new timings till they close for summer vacation.

Gurgaon and Noida schools, too, are keen to let the students go home early. Delhi Public School, Gurgaon (sector 45), and Blue Bells School, Gurgaon, have reduced their hours by one and two hours respectively.

In Noida, schools have made the same decision but on orders from the District Magistrate. “The heat was getting to the kids. We had changed our hours before the DM’s order came,” said Seems Jaireth, principal, DLF Public School, Sahibabad.

This year, all schools will stay shut during the October Games. To make up for lost time, the summer vacation has been reduced from 61 to 49 days. And summers are not going to make attending school any easier for the students.

Except for the temporary relief brought in by the Western Disturbance earlier this week, the Capital has been recording abnormally high temperatures since last month. The month of March this year, in fact, was the second warmest since 1901.

(with inputs from Sanjeev Ahuja and Kapil Datta)