Delhi schools resume in earnest – with excited students and mid-day meals

Awadhesh Jha, principal Sarvodaya Vidyalaya Rohini Sector-8, said the attendance on Friday was “overwhelming”.

“The students who were with us in the last academic year were expected to show up and they did. But we thought class VI might be difficult because many children are transferred to our school from the feeder MCD schools, but these new children also showed up in large numbers. We had around 70% attendance in class VI and 85% in other grades. The students were particularly excited because our new uniform came into use from Friday,” he said.

Some schools expect a better turnout from Monday. At Veer Savarkar Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya, for instance, out of 40 students each in both sections of class V, 18 students turned up from section A and 19 from section B, so both sections sat together. Their teacher Bhavna said that though schools are supposed to have moved offline, she will still be sending the rest of the children work online to make sure they do not miss out, and expects most of the students to attend from Monday since she will be meeting most parents in the PTM scheduled for Saturday.

Though all of the children in her class had been coming to school in February and March, when their lunch break started at 10:20 am, many were surprised to hear that they were going to get “school wala khana” again. Most of them had brought packed lunch boxes from home as they had been doing for the last month and a half. Cooked midday meals resumed for the first time since March 2020 and children had been receiving dry rations monthly as a substitute.

Ten-year-old Akshara was excited to hear this. “Will they make it every day?” she asked, as she lined up with her friends to collect the khichdi in her lunch box. Asked why she seemed to prefer it to her packed lunches, she said, “It’s like before, we all take our food together and eat it together.” After eating, she put her littis back in the empty box to take back home.

On Saturday, teachers in all government schools will conduct parent-teacher-meeting. Class teachers of classes III to IX will brief parents about their children’s learning levels as per baseline assessments conducted by them and inform them about foundational learning efforts, which will take place at school. For senior students, teachers will speak to parents about their performance in exams and tests and about how parents can support them in their upcoming annual examinations.