PANAJI: The directorate of education (DoE) has issued a letter of warning to 55 schools in the state, asking them to submit vaccination data on school staffers by August 6 or face action. “It is noticed that your schools have failed to submit the information till date. This is a serious matter, and now, it is to inform that your schools furnish the said information by August 6, 2021, failing which action will be taken against the defaulter schools,” deputy director of education S S Ghadi has said in the letter to school managements.
Many prominent schools feature in the list of 55 defaulters. A majority of the institutes in the list, 31, are schools located in Tiswadi, most being Panaji-based. Sixteen of the institutes that are yet to submit the vaccination data are schools for special children located across Goa. The other defaulting regular schools are located in Salcete, Pernem and Sattari. Ghadi has reminded schools that they had been asked on July 18 to submit information to the block resource cluster office about the number of school teaching and non-teaching staff who have received their first and second dose of the vaccine.
On July 13, the state government had issued a circular to schools asking teaching and non-teaching staff to get themselves vaccinated on an urgent basis, failing which they would have to produce a negative RT-PCR test result every week to be able to report to work.
The DoE has also told school staffers to ensure that their family members are vaccinated. The instructions were issued after CM Pramod Sawant had announced that expert members of the task force had recommended priority vaccination of school teaching and non-teaching staff, to safeguard children from Covid-19 infection ahead of the third wave.
