The District Education Officer for Ahmedabad City has told school managements and principals they may hold voluntary classes on Sundays this month to recover time lost to monsoon closures, according to DeshGujarat and a separate circular reported by Gujarat Samachar. The order covers government, grant-in-aid and private schools across every board, in both the eastern and western zones of the city.
Participation is not compulsory. Schools that opt in must give students and parents advance notice, confirm teachers are available, and keep sessions limited to revision, doubt-solving and assessments rather than fresh coursework, per DeshGujarat’s account of the circular. The order also tells schools to weigh local weather and their own infrastructure before scheduling a Sunday session, and to treat student safety as the priority throughout.
A monsoon that kept closing schools
Ahmedabad’s academic calendar took repeated hits this monsoon. The city’s schools and colleges shut on July 31 after the India Meteorological Department warned of extremely heavy rainfall, a closure that also extended to Vadodara. Earlier in July, intense rain triggered waterlogging and traffic disruption across several districts, though that round did not bring a formal holiday order for Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar. Add up enough single-day closures across a season and boards running fixed-date exams start to feel the squeeze, which is the practical problem this circular is trying to solve.
What it means for Ahmedabad families
For parents, the order effectively hands the decision to each school rather than mandating a citywide catch-up schedule, so the actual number of Sunday sessions, and whether a given child’s school runs any at all, will vary. That is likely deliberate: schools differ in how much instructional time they lost and in whether teachers and facilities are realistically available on a weekend. Students preparing for board exams later in the academic year stand to benefit most directly if their schools use the extra sessions for genuine revision rather than treating them as a formality.
The order also puts a burden on schools to communicate clearly, since voluntary Sunday classes only work if parents get enough notice to plan around them and if attendance doesn’t become an unstated expectation despite being officially optional.
What to watch next
Whether other Gujarat cities that lost similar instructional time, including Vadodara and Surat, issue comparable orders is worth tracking, as is whether Ahmedabad schools that do hold Sunday sessions report meaningfully better syllabus completion by the time formal exams begin.
Sources: DeshGujarat, Gujarat Samachar
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.