By Joseph Varghese/Staff Reporter

Indian schools in Qatar have not yet declared the summer vacation which has made the parents undecided over their travel plans.

An early announcement by schools will help everybody to make arrangements for the summer vacation well on time, some of the parents said.

Earlier, parents had the option to choose either summer or the winter vacation to travel home. But, with the winter vacation getting shortened to one to two weeks, all the families are forced to travel during summer. This has made the situation very tricky for many due to high airfare and unavailability of tickets unless they make early bookings.

Some  parents opined that they need to get  the summer vacation schedule as early as possible so that they can plan their annual vacation accordingly. “I need to get my annual leave sanctioned from my company according to the summer vacation of my children. Similarly, there are others also in my company who will be travelling during the same period. So we need to arrange everything and an early summer vacation schedule will help us in this regard,” said one of the parents.

The Supreme Education Council (SEC) had announced in the 2013-2014 academic calendar in September that next year’s summer break for Independent schools in Qatar will begin on July 13 and end on September 7. Last year SEC had unified the vacation period for all the schools in the country but SEC has not specified anything about private schools in the schedule this year.

When contacted, Indian school officials said that they are in the process of announcing the summer vacation schedule in consultation with the SEC. The school officials also said that many of them are yet to decide on the mid-term break suggested by the SEC during this academic year.

MES Indian School Principal A P Sasidharan said that the school is likely to close for summer vacation from  6 July for the students and will reopen on September 8.  He said, “Since September 7 is the Indian festival of Onam, we will reopen on 8th September.

The school schedule for this year is already prepared long back and including the mid-term break in the second semester this year is very difficult.

Therefore, we have requested the SEC for exemption and from next year, we will implement the SEC schedule about the mid term break.”

Birla Public School Principal A K Shrivastava said that the school might close by 3rd July and reopen on 7th September. “However, the schedule depends on the mid- term break during the second term and only after confirming the same with the SEC, we will announce the final schedule. We also have to look into the board examinations for the students in the month of March as well as the final examinations for all the other classes before reaching on a decision,” he added.

An Ideal Indian School official said that the school is in the process of finalising the schedule for next academic year and the vacation schedule along with the 2014-2015 academic year schedule will be announced soon.