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Schools for Classes 6 to 8 set to reopen across Karnataka today
According to the guidelines, classes will be conducted with 50% attendance on alternative days, five days a week. During weekends, sanitization will be done, R Ashok, Karnataka’s minister for revenue department and in-charge of Covid-19 in Bengaluru said last Monday.
Physical classes for school children between classes 6 and 8 will resume from Monday across Karnataka after the Basavaraj Bommai government allowed further relaxations to bring back normalcy in the state.
There are over 3.1 million students in these three classes across around 38,000 schools in the state, according to official data.
“From Monday morning, classes will resume for classes 6, 7 and 8. All the necessary arrangements have been made by the education department and other department officials have also joined hands,” BC Nagesh, Karnataka’s minister for primary and secondary education said on Sunday.
He added that schools were reopened based on the interest and request from parents and guardians.
Nagesh said that all sanitization has been completed across the schools in the state. However, talukas that have a positivity rate higher than 2% will not be allowed to reopen according to the government.
According to the guidelines, classes will be conducted with 50% attendance on alternative days, five days a week. During weekends, sanitization will be done, R Ashok, Karnataka’s minister for revenue department and in-charge of Covid-19 in Bengaluru said last Monday.
The decision to reopen schools comes at a time when parent bodies and others have questioned the government’s need to ask students to return despite the lurking threat of the third wave of Covid-19 infections. There are also allegations that the government is heeding to pressure from private schools to bring back students and force parents to pay the entire school fees.
Classes for students in classes 9, 10, 11 and 12 began on August 23. Ministers of the government, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and others have been trying to get more parents and guardians to send their children back to school.
Nagesh said that they will observe the results of allowing students to return to schools and then take a decision on classes below 5th standard.
A technical advisory committee (TAC) on the third wave, headed by noted cardiologist, Dr Devi Shetty, had submitted its report to the Basavaraj Bommai government on June 22.
It had strongly recommended that schools and physical classes be resumed at the earliest. “Any further delay in school reopening may push children into malnutrition, child labour, child marriage, child trafficking, begging etc., making their condition further worse,” according to the report submitted to the government on 22 June.
According to the TAC, there are 23,838,995 people below the age of 18 in the state with an estimated population of 70,259,592, accounting for around 34%.
There are 24,391 schools that have classes between 1 and 5 which have over 5.4 million students and around 162,000 teachers, data shows.
Ashok, on Monday last week, said that 6,472 samples had been taken from students attending schools and only 14 of them have tested positive so far, which he said, was a validation for the government’s initiative to resume physical classes. Ashok had also said that there were 2,912 gram panchayats in the state that had zero Covid cases.
Data shared by the government stated that there have been days when the percentage of attendance in classes 9 and 10 were around 65%, which the government believes is testimony that more students want to return to schools at the earliest.
