Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio -
After a two-week winter break, school in Islamabad started as usual at the beginning of January — but Shumaila Nelofar’s two children did not go.
With morning temperatures hovering just above freezing, their mother kept them at home rather than have them sit in unheated classrooms during a bone-chilling cold snap that gripped the capital for much of a month.
“How could I be so heartless to allow my children to go to school in the harsh cold,” she asked.
Her 10-year-old daughter Amina Khan said that heavy fog on the first of January also forced her and her sister to turn back to their home in Ghouri, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of the Pakistani capital, during their walk to school.
Schools in Pakistan normally reopen on Jan. 1, but this year many parents, particularly in central and northern Pakistan, have been reluctant to send their children as temperatures remain unusually low.
Some parents and teachers have urged the government to extend the normal two-week winter holiday to protect the health of both children and teachers — a measure some schools have already taken.
“Teaching in classrooms without heaters in such freezing cold weather compelled me and the most of my fellow teachers to refuse to attend school,” said Naila Khan, a biology teacher at a government girls’ school in the capital’s upscale F-6 sector.
“Many schools like ours are without heaters to keep the classrooms warm, and even if there are heaters, they’re good for nothing because of extended gas and electricity outages,” she said.
Schools are experiencing similar problems at the other end of the year. Weather that is too hot for students and teachers to focus on their work now often extends beyond the June and July summer break.
Scientists at the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) say that each successive summer since 2010 has been the hottest recorded in the country, with increasingly frequent and intense heatwaves.
Jam Mehtab Hussain Dahar, the education minister of Sindh province, said his department is considering adjusting the onset of winter and summer holidays to the weather each year, a measure that found support from Rana Mashhood Ahmed, Punjab’s minister.
“We are planning to keep the school vacations schedule flexible to adjust with the shifting extreme winter and summer days,” Ahmed said. — Thomson Reuters Foundation
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