Only one school near Dadar blast site shut

MUMBAI: Having missed the explosion at Dadar by a few minutes, authorities of Dr Antonio D'Silva School and Junior College in Dadar decided to remain closed on Thursday morning. While all the other schools and colleges in the area chose to remain open, police officials told TOI that D'Silva School will stay shut for a while.
School and college principals across the city were frantically taking calls from worried parents on Wednesday night and, after much deliberation, they decided to keep their institutions open on Thursday.
“We left the decision of sending children to school to their parents. Surprisingly, the attendance was normal,” said Carl Laurie, principal of Christ Church School, Dadar.
If the bomb scare was one problem on everybody's mind, constant rains in the morning led to fresh concerns. “We kept the school working only for our secondary students and declared a day off for the others. However, worried parents gathered at our school gate by 10 am and asked for permission to take their wards back home to avoid getting stuck in the rains,” said Fr Michael Pinto, principal of Holy Name High School, Colaba. Some schools consciously decided to let their students go home only after the rains stopped. “That way, no student got stuck in the rains,” said Deepshikha Srivastav, principal of Rajhans Vidyalaya at Andheri (West).
Several city schools took a similar step and shut their primary and pre-primary sections for the day. “We first decided to cancel our tests for students thinking the attendance will be low, but were surprised to see full attendance in the secondary section. So we held our scheduled class test without any problem,” said Perin Bagli, principal of Activity School on Peddar Road.
Meanwhile, students who had attended King George School at Hindu Colony were also sent back by the school authorities way before time.