Freezing weather alters school routine
Weather grows more unpredictable across the country as a result of climate change
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.
“It looked like dense wet clouds had landed on the ground, with almost zero visibility in the morning,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation recently as she and her sister returned home from school with their classmates.
Schools in Pakistan normally reopen on January 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.
Similar problems
“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.
Part of the problem, she said, is that the two-week school winter break is aimed to fall on the coldest days of the year — but this year the colder period has come much later, as weather grows more unpredictable across Pakistan as a result of climate change.
Schools are experiencing similar problems at the other end of the year as well. Weather that is too hot for students and teachers to focus on their work now often extends beyond the usual June and July summer break.
Last year, schools were supposed to reopen on August 1 after a two-month break, but the government extended the holiday until mid-August, following temperature highs of between 35 and 41 degrees Celsius (95 to 106 degrees Fahrenheit) in all but the mountainous northern areas.