Horror of reaching school in time

Shamim Ashraf
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	As it takes hours to reach school, kids fall asleep from tiredness. Photo: Star

Tanjila Jahan nudges her son Shabab softly as she glances at the wall clock. "It's already 5:00am! Wake up or you'll miss the class!" she says loudly.

The next 15-20 minutes are a race against time for the mother, as she gets her son ready. They have to reach Dhanmondi Road 27 from Mohammadpur by 6:45am in order to catch his school bus.

For every minute they linger at home in the "crucial" morning hours, hundreds of vehicles are pouring onto the city streets to delay them.

This is the reality for most of the children living in the capital. For many of them, going to school means waking up almost before sunrise. It's because if they get out of home a bit late, they would surely get stuck in horrendous traffic jams.

With so many vehicles -- cars, school buses, microbuses, rickshaws and rickshaw-vans -- carrying school going children and clogging the streets at certain hours in the morning, parents deliberately try to hit the road as early as possible.

The children are bearing the brunt of all this, sleeping less than what they usually require at this stage. Many of the children take a nap on the way, and some sleepily chew their breakfast on the way to school.

For many students like Shabab Anjum Khan, who is in class seven at the Uttara branch of Sunbeams School, travelling by school transportation doesn't make things any better.

Traffic movement through Dhanmondi, Lalmatia, Gulshan, Mirpur, Uttara and Kakrail areas of the main concentration of educational institutions in the city -- literally comes to a standstill during morning hours.

The situation is terrible in Dhanmondi as there are a large number of schools in that area.

A 10-minute journey from their home at Dhanmondi Road 7A to Dhanmondi Tutorial on Road 8 takes Ashiana Reaz almost an hour by car.

"To avoid the acute jam in Dhanmondi, we take a long detour around the area to hit Mirpur Road at Road 2 juncture," Ashiana's mother Safwana Chowdhury said, adding that it saves them 20 "valuable" minutes.

Susan Khan, a class eight student of the Uttara branch of Scholastica, has to wake up at around 6:30am to reach her school from Mohammadpur. It takes her over an hour to get to school by car. But if she leaves home any later than 7:30am, she will definitely miss most of her first class.

"Many schools, like my son's, close the entrance 10 minutes before the classes start. Delayed by traffic jam, we have had to return home on several occasions," said Farhana Ahmed, whose son Wasi Farhan Khan is a class three student at Academia in Lalmatia.

For many, the way to school is not as bad as the way back home.

On most days, Susan does not return home from school before 4:30pm, though her school ends at 2:40pm.

Shabab's class ends at 1:30pm but his school bus does not reach Dhanmondi before two hours.

This eats up a long time from the everyday routines of these children. They are deprived of adequate time to rest and taking part in extracurricular activities. Most of them can't even have lunch at proper hours.

To avoid traffic jams, many parents try shifting their children to schools near their homes, but few are lucky like Shahjahan Majumder and his daughter Suprava, residents of South Goran.

Suprava Seboti Rodoshi, now 7, was a kindergarten student at Udayan School and College on Fullar Road.

"To attend the assembly at 10:45am, Suprava always had to start by 9:00am," Shahjhan said.

When caught in the traffic jams, the girl often fell sick and used to throw up on way to and from school. This forced her father to shift her to a school in Malibagh this year.