Bomb threats, pollution alerts and online classes: The new holiday calendar in schools | India News
Amid online classes, pollution and bomb threats, the school calendar has a new holiday today
Remember waking up as a child to the sound of rain and thundering clouds, your first thought whispering, “Will today be a rainy day?”Let’s say there is a new form of rain break in modern day school life.Books have given way to tablets, chalkboards to smart boards. And the much-anticipated rainy day “holiday” has been replaced by online classes and bomb threat evacuations due to pollution.In a recent incident, multiple schools in Ahmedabad, Gujarat received bomb threat emails.
The students were dispersed, an investigation was launched and ultimately nothing suspicious was found. Still, the disruption was real.Such incidents are not isolated anymore. They marked a shift that few could have imagined — a shift that is quickly becoming routine.So, in this evolving landscape, has the idea of an immediate day-off changed?Technology is no longer an add-on; It is ideal. Distance learning now runs parallel to the physical classroom. Since Covid, technology has become intricately woven into students’ daily lives. Online classes have become the default response to disruption. For today’s kids, a canceled school day no longer translates to freedom.But something else has changed to preserve continuity.But the larger question lingers: How is it reshaping the academic landscape? And more importantly, what is happening to the children who grow up in it? Are the repeated pollution warnings and bomb threats starting to feel routine? Is a generation slowly becoming desensitized to the dangers that can cause danger?The topography of the golden days of one’s life, school life, has changed on a grand scale.For caregivers, transition brings layered emotions. There is relief in knowing that education no longer collapses at the first sign of disruption. Technology provides stability.Still there is discomfort. A nostalgia for simple obstacles.And somewhere between nostalgia and necessity, a new version of school life is quietly taking shape — one that no one quite expected, yet an entire generation is learning to call normal.
“Rainy Day” login
Parents describe a clear change in school life post-Covid, where technology and online classes have gone from an emergency measure to the default backup for almost any disruption.Tejash Tarun, a Bengaluru-based parent, points out how logistical difficulties now trigger digital changes rather than cancellations.“Even for relatively minor issues, say road repairs on the last stretch leading to the school, classes are now not cancelled. Instead, the school will send notifications for a week of online classes,” he said.His observation underscores a broader structural shift. Continuity now surpasses interruption, and the concept of a break once embedded in school culture is steadily disappearing.Radhika Ashok Kumar, another parent, also pointed out that administrative and logistical requirements are increasingly pushing towards online learning.“Last year, the school was the center of the board. So some sessions were planned online.”But online classes bring their own challenges. Young people highlight the material demands that online education places on families.He said, “If a child goes to class from home, they also need a suitable place to study. Secondly, they need a suitable device. It can’t just be a mobile phone for a few minutes. A laptop or a computer is essential.”Highlighting the pitfalls that parents may face in their professional lives, he said, “For working parents and with the work-from-home system largely gone, if a child’s school suddenly shifts to online classes, it poses an immediate challenge. They may have to take leave or try to manage work from home, if that option is even available.”A concept widely promoted as institutional flexibility can, at the household level, translate into logistical strains.
Space, screen and social life
The place of learning has expanded beyond the school campus.Across discourses, offline schooling remains indispensable for social, emotional, and holistic personality development—there is broad agreement that there is “no substitute” for going to school for real-world interactions with peers and teachers, learning social norms, and building discipline and routine.Manish Masum, a Delhi-based parent whose children’s classes have witnessed a shift online due to the implementation of GRAP measures, shares the value of real-world interactions over online classes.
He said, “Ideally, children should go to school, sit in classrooms, and learn with others. After all, humans are social by nature. Be it pollution, strike calls or any other disruption, the shift to online classes creates its own set of problems.”Tarun further elaborates on how he sees micro-lessons embedded in everyday school life.He says, “Beyond academics, school is where children learn community interactions. A classmate might borrow my pencil today; tomorrow, I might borrow their notebook. These small exchanges teach cooperation, sharing and understanding.”When asked about the drawbacks of online classes, parents cited their children’s lack of preparation as offered by offline classes.Radhika shares, “For lower grades, I think it was still manageable, at least for my son. But in higher grades, I noticed that children struggle with subjects like maths, science and chemistry.”He added that online classes often fall behind in preparing students for a greater understanding of stress, as he says, “When students were in Class 9 during online sessions, some of them had not built a strong foundation. As a result, when they move to Class 10, they find it difficult to cope with the academic pressure as their fundamentals are not clear.”
In preserving the academic calendar, schools may have inadvertently widened conceptual gaps. And on top of that, screen time has emerged as another tough battle for parents.For some, e-learning sessions have significantly increased the number of hours their children spend in front of screens. For others, avoiding screens entirely seems almost impossible.Parents noted that online classes add a non-negotiable stretch of screen exposure to a student’s day. However, beyond this, television, mobile phones, gaming and social media continue to contribute to continuous digital engagement.In a landscape where learning itself is mediated through devices, defining boundaries is no longer as simple as removing a gadget. It becomes a delicate balancing act that calls for weighing academic requirements against cognitive relaxation, connections against overexposure.
Shadows in the hallway: The new safety normal
If digital transformations represent one dimension of change, repeated bomb threats and fraudulent emails represent another. This not only becomes a logistical problem but also affects the emotional climate.When it comes to bomb threats and fraudulent emails, parents’ memories cluster around a new kind of routine disruption. But how is this new chaos affecting children? Where is this taking their sensibilities and how are schools and parents able to manage this?In a unanimous vote, parents shared that the schools did a commendable job of handling the situation without causing unnecessary panic for the students. Evacuation may or may not occur based on the severity of the threat, but students must not have been informed of the threat.The evacuation was carried out calmly without causing direct panic among students and was accompanied by clear and timely communication with parents.
Indian school bomb threat
Rather, for younger children, parents prefer to keep things discreet for them.Neha Arora, a teacher and a parent from Delhi, sheds light on the approach “Considering how young the children are, the school has made no attempt to explain their situation in clear or direct language. We have consciously kept him away from such news and events, as he is still too young to fully understand these concepts,” she said.Older children, however, operate in a different information ecosystem. With access enabled, they have an increased curiosity about what happened.Akansha Ashu shares how her 15-year-old child reacted after her school was evacuated following bomb threat messages. He describes how curiosity shapes their responses.“My son was deeply involved in the discussion. Putting everything else aside, they started talking about who was involved, who might be the culprit and who did what,” she says, “He didn’t enjoy these conversations, but there was no sense of fear in them. They were not intimidated either.”Innocent about the inevitability of information flow in the digital age. He also added that his son was generally curious about the happenings around him. Despite being only 10 years old, he reads and understands everything.He attributes this awareness to access to technology. Whether they talk about things or not, children can explore and understand on their own, and as a final step, they turn to their parents for answers.He said, “In today’s scenario, whether I explain something to him or not, he already knows a lot. This information reaches the kids directly. Even if he doesn’t watch the news, countless content creators are discussing such topics in different ways, some in a serious tone, some humorously or dramatically.He added, “Naturally, when children see such content, they become curious. They try to understand it at their own level and then come to us with questions. He’s only 10 years old – but they’re definitely more aware than we expected.”
The new landscape of normal
At first glance, the contrast can feel almost apocalyptic. But history reminds us that each generation grows up with a new version of the world in its time.What we’re seeing today isn’t just a change in how school works—it’s a change in what feels “normal” for children.The simple thrill of an unexpected vacation, the shared pause when life briefly slows down, the innocence of escape from larger worries—these small but meaningful parts of childhood don’t fade, but reinvent themselves.In their place stands a system optimized for stability, but one that asks children to constantly adapt while feeding their curiosity well.It is no longer a question of whether education can continue in the face of disruption. It obviously can.A more important conversation lies elsewhere: As schools evolve between nostalgia and necessity, how do we preserve the human rhythm, the joy, the break, the sense of ease of the school day?
