CHITRAL: In a formal letter to the provincial administration, the stakeholders and parents have requested an exemption for Chitral from the government’s two-day weekly school closure policy (Friday and Saturday), citing irreversible academic losses to students in the region.

The appeal was made public through an open letter addressed to the chief secretary of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by Brigadier (retd) Khush Muhammad Khan, general manager of the Aga Khan Education Service Pakistan (AKESP) for the Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral regions.

The letter highlights that while the government’s austerity and fiscal discipline measures are understandable, the policy is severely harming the academic growth of children in remote and underserved mountain communities.

“It has been contended that unlike urban areas, nearly 90 per cent of students and teachers in Chitral walk to school with the result that the commuting contributes very little to fuel consumption, meaning the financial savings achieved by closing schools are marginal compared to the educational loss.

“Online learning is not viable at all in Chitral due to poor internet connectivity and lack of digital infrastructure, meaning a missed school day results in a total loss of learning time”.

“As a designated winter zone, Chitral already suffers from an extended winter vacation exceeding two months, alongside summer breaks and that the region has far fewer teaching days available annually than the rest of the province,” reads the letter.

It has been pointed out that the frequent summer floods, landslides, heavy rainfall, and road blockages regularly cause unpredictable, forced school closures while the current policy had severely compounded the existing pressure for completing syllabi.

The letter also states, “Due to extreme winter conditions, effective teaching becomes highly difficult after October. The months of May and June provide the most stable climate for academic engagement, making weekly closures during this peak window highly detrimental.”

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2026