A Raisi administration official: The Ministry of Education received more than three trillion tomans in aid from well-wishers this year

While the share of education in the country's general budget in Bill 1401 is only 8.5 percent, the Deputy Minister of Education in the government of Ebrahim Raisi says that the ministry has received "three trillion tomans" of aid from well-wishers this year.

According to Tasnim News Agency on Thursday, January 20, Mehrollah Derakhshani Mehr, Deputy Minister of Education, said: "This year, the government has received more than three trillion tomans in aid from donors, and 2.35 trillion tomans from donors have contributed to school construction."

He listed "Isfahan, Khorasan Razavi, Sistan and Baluchestan, and Khuzestan" as prominent provinces in the participation of philanthropists in the field of school construction, and stated that in Kashan, 80 percent of schools are "philanthropic."

One of the schools built by well-wishers was built in memory of their son and named after him in Sistan and Baluchestan province by the parents of Alvand Sadeghi, one of the victims of the downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane by an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps missile attack.

According to Derakhshani-Mehr, there are 20,000 "half-complete" classrooms in Iran, and the Ministry of Education wants to complete "14,700" classrooms this year and hand them over to the general education departments.

According to estimates, there are 13 million students in the public education sector in Iran, with both formal and contract staff.

The small share of education in the country's public budget in Bill 1401 has raised new concerns, with some experts saying that education is becoming "poorer."

The allocation of 8.5 percent of the country's public budget for education in next year's budget bill comes at a time when, according to education expert Mohammad Reza Niknejad, according to global standards that are "also emphasized in the Fundamental Transformation Document," education's share of the public budget should be "around 20 percent."

Tejarat News, examining the budget increases of some ministries, reported that the Ministry of Communications had the largest budget increase with 134 percent, while the increase in education was only 14 percent.

There is a severe lack of financial resources in education, even though the Ministry of Education has previously announced that students' risk-taking has increased 10-fold.

Also, student suicides due to poverty in Iran have been frequently reported by news and human rights sources in recent years.

Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly on December 1, acknowledged that "we have damaged education over the past two decades," and said that despite the anticipated transformation document, education has lagged behind for a decade and "we, the officials, must be held accountable for that."

On the other hand, teachers across Iran have been protesting widely for months against the chaotic living conditions and are demanding the approval and full implementation of the teacher rating bill. A bill that they believe was "scrapped" by the parliament, but which the Guardian Council has since reversed for reasons most notably "financial burden."

Source: Voice of America