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Israeli parents leading rolling school strike against enlarged classes

Tuesday, 9. June 2015 - 12:15

Classes in Givatayim and Ashdod will start at 10 A.M. on Monday due to a parent’s committee strike in both cities. Parents are opposing the Education Ministry’s decision to reshuffle classes back to their original size of 40 students per class, as they were before local authorities decided to split some classes up.

Photo Yaron Brener

The strike is expected to continue throughout the week, and by tomorrow is to include Omer and Afula. By Wednesday, Ra’anana, Kfar Sava, Herzliya, Ramat Hasharon are expected to join, with Gedera and Givat Brenner expected to join on Friday.

Parents committees in the towns announced the strike after a meeting with Michal Cohen, director general of the Education Ministry last week, which ended without a resolution of the issue. During the meeting, the parents found out that Cohen had already issued an order to school principals to use local authorities’ budgets to reconfigure the classes that had been split up. The representatives for the parents’ committees were opposed to the order. Cohen asserted that Education Minister Naftali Bennett will solve the problem, but he has yet to make a decision.

On Sunday, the central committee for local authorities, an organization that represents local authorities to the government, sent a letter to Bennett, expressing support for the parents’ opposition. Haim Bibas, mayor of Modi’in, and Ramat Gan Mayor Israel Zinger wrote to Bennett as well, urgently requesting his intervention in the matter. “

“We believe that during a time at which the government has declared its intention to invest in education as a means to advance society, there is no justification for increasing class sizes,” the mayors wrote. “The Education Ministry guidelines have recently forbidden creating irregular classes, even when they are funded by local authorities. We believe that this issue is of national importance, and the ministry that you lead must find the necessary funding,” wrote the mayors.

“Following our inquiry with the previous education minister, MK Shay Piron, a committee was convened to consider alternative solutions, and we ask that those solutions be considered,” continued the letter.

Yarden Skop

Source: 
www.haaretz.com
Tags: 
enlarged classes
Israeli parents
strike