NCRI Iran News | Society
Iran: Worn-Out Schools Threatening Lives of Students
- Friday, 07 April 2017 17:38
NCRI - According to the director of the Task Force to Modernize Tehran Province’s Schools, there are nearly 1000 worn-out, unsafe schools in the province, accounting for 25-30 percent of the educational space.
The regime’s education official says that at least three billion tomans is needed to restore an old school, making it impossible to provide the financial resources to modernize a thousand schools.
The average age of these schools is 35-40 years and even more, which are being used despite lacking standard requirements and being in a critical, unusable state. (Regime’s Khabar TV, April 4)
Meanwhile, head of the Task Force to Modernize Country’s Schools has spoken of 164 thousand classrooms in the country that need retrofitting. (State-run ISNA news agency, March 31, 2017)
Also Tasnim news agency quotes the head of ‘Iranian School Builders Donor Community’ as saying “country’s worn-out schools threaten lives of millions of students.” (State-run Tasnim news agency, March 24, 2016)
All this is in addition to the fact that all the country’s students have not the possibility to study at ordinary schools. A significant number of students have to study in ‘conex box classrooms’, which are far from being safe.
Regime’s Channel five recently reported on a school in Yousefkal village in Sardasht, whose students were faced with the school’s oil heater flaring up less than an hour after they entered their classroom. The report continues to say that there are many conex box classrooms in the country that are far from educational standards.
Country’s worn-out schools and tight educational spaces are not only threatening student’s lives, but lower the learning capacities of them as well.
In this regard, the so-called ‘executive headquarters of Imam’s directive’ website quotes the head of ‘East-Azerbaijan School Modernization Task Force’ as saying “a few days ago, I visited a 1700-square-meter school near Tabriz, while 530 students were studying there so that the benches in classrooms were so close to the blackboard. These conditions will undermine both students and teachers and significantly lower learning level as the space is not suitable for a classroom and is far from standards.”
So, it becomes clear that worn-out schools are not limited to a city or a province, but schools all over the country are in such worn-out state.
When provinces like Tehran, West and East Azerbaijan have such conditions, it would be quite predictable how deplorable the status of schools in remote, deprived provinces like Sistan and Baluchestan is.
Despite such dangerous conditions, however, the regime has done nothing about it. While the funds allocated to security entities like the Revolutionary Guards and law enforcement forces increase every year, the Education funding is so low that 98 percent of it is spent on employees’ salaries, as confessed by regime officials.
Regime’s former Deputy Minister of Education says in an interview with the terrorist Quds Force’s Tasnim news agency that 2017 will be a tough year for the Ministry.
“Ministry of Education should pay 33 thousand billion tomans to its employees in 2017”, he added,”This means that there will be a drought of financial resources this year as well.”
The regime official added that the 2016 budget didn’t meet the Ministry’s needs either. “If the Ministry of Education pays on average 2500 billion tomans to its employees each month, it will be running out of budget to pay for the employees’ New Year rewards, and this is a hidden deficit. When (the Ministry’s) necessary financial resources are not allocated in the state budget, this means that school principals will be forced to spend from family’s pockets, thus forcing families to fund public schools.” (State-run Tasnim news agency, December 5, 2016)
The reality is that to expect this regime to address the problem of worn-out schools would be quite unrealistic, as what in the midst of regime’s corruption and plundering is not important, is the threatened lives of millions of students who study in old, worn-out schools.
