The Karnataka government on Monday announced that schools for classes 6-8 will open from September 6. The classes will be scheduled for five days in a week, while the other two days will be used for sanitization. Only 50% attendance will be allowed in each class. This is for the first time that regular classes will resume for these students since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. The state government had already reopened schools from Class 8 to 12 in the previous week.
Revenue Minister R Ashoka who was addressing reporters following a meeting chaired by Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai and the state level TAC said the schools will remain closed for districts with a positivity rate higher than 2%.
As of now Bengaluru has has a TPR of 0.54% over the last week, which means schools in the district can open for students from 6th standard. Classes for 8th standard onwards started a few days ago.
Though the government was apprehensive about starting schools as there was fear of a third wave, the government said that they decided to go ahead with the re-opening of classes after conducting COVID-19 tests on 76000 children. Only 14 of the children tested positive.
States like Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have resumed school for all classes. The Karnataka government has said that any decision for classes for children in 5th standard and below will be taken after a few weeks.
This comes days after the Technical Advisory Committee on COVID-19 recommended resuming physical lessons for Classes 6, 7 and 8. The TAC had recommended that random RT-PCR tests be conducted in schools weekly consisting of 10% of the students. With the test, the positivity rate has to be monitored. Additionally, the TAC report said that if the positivity rate went beyond two percent, the schools had to be closed for a week and sanitized.
The TAC had suggested waiting for three weeks before reopening schools for Class 6-8 students, as it would provide three weeks’ time to study the effects of the current reopening of Classes 9 to 12.
Meanwhile, the private hospital association in the state had advised against reopening of schools citing some incidents of infection among school children in the US and Israel.