96,000 Classrooms in Iran Need Reinforcement
According to the head of the School Renovation Organization, the Ministry of Education does not have sufficient budget for reinforcing dilapidated schools. The plan to reinforce non-standard schools began a decade ago but has not been very successful due to budget shortages.
The shortage of educational space and the non-standard nature of many classrooms in Iran is a problem that officials themselves acknowledge. The renovation and reinforcement of non-standard schools, given the pace pursued in recent years, appears to be a project doomed to failure.
Mohammad Taghi Nazarpour, head of the School Renovation, Development and Equipment Organization, says that if we consider a standard educational space of approximately 5.2 square meters per student, 11 provinces in Iran do not meet this average.
One-Third of Schools Are Non-Standard
The former head of this organization, Morteza Raisi, said in early November of last year that one-third of Iran’s schools are non-standard, and in some provinces like Alborz, half of schools operate in two shifts due to lack of educational space. He also reported the existence of 700 brick and stone classrooms in Iran.
The current head of the renovation organization said on Sunday, October 7, to ILNA news agency: “There are provinces that have only four square meters of space per student, and we need to build approximately 34,000 classrooms so that the average per capita educational space in these provinces reaches that of other provinces, for which we need 6,000 billion tomans of credit.”
In the proposed budget bill for this year, the total budget of the Ministry of Education was proposed at 32,000 billion tomans, which was later increased to 37,000 billion tomans.
According to the details of the budget bill, almost all the credit allocated to the Ministry of Education is spent on current expenses and employee salaries of this ministry.
Mohammad Taghi Nazarpour told ILNA: “The implementation of the plan to demolish and rebuild non-standard schools and reinforce structurally unsound schools began in 2006, and to implement it, 132,000 classrooms had to be demolished and rebuilt. Of these classrooms, approximately 64,000 classrooms have been renovated, meaning 49 percent of this plan has been implemented to date, and approximately 62,000 classrooms need renovation.”
The Endless Cycle of Reinforcement
The head of the school renovation and development organization added: “Regarding classroom reinforcement, measures have been taken since the same year 2006, and based on studies, 126,000 classrooms should have been reinforced. In these years, 30,000 classrooms have been reinforced, and the rest remain and require credit.”
By this calculation, nearly 100,000 classrooms still need reinforcement, and with the pace pursued over the past decade, standardizing them would take more than three decades.
Mohammad Gharazi, then head of the Engineering System Council in 2009, said the useful life of buildings in Iran is between 25 to 35 years and approximately one-eighth the useful life of buildings in developed countries. On this basis, by the time work to improve identified non-resistant classrooms is completed, thousands of schools will have become non-resistant again, and this cycle will continue.
Although budget shortage has always been cited as the number one problem of education in Iran, poor management also plays an important role in the critical situation of this sector.
Neglect of School Construction in Mehr Housing Projects
The deputy minister of education and head of the school renovation organization said on April 21 of this year at the margins of a ceremony commemorating teachers’ day in Gonbad Kavous that Iran faces a shortage of 52,000 classrooms, and “of this number, 25,000 classrooms were needed in Mehr Housing projects but were not considered during construction.”
According to ILNA, Mohammad Taghi Nazarpour expressed hope that by September of this year, 7,000 classrooms would be built in settlements called “Mehr Housing” where school construction was neglected. Even if this program is realized, Mehr Housing residential units would still be short 18,000 classrooms.
As Nazarpour stated, Iran currently has 107,000 schools with 530,000 classrooms, and 108,000 classrooms have been built by “school-building philanthropists” from 2003 to now. In other words, approximately one-fifth of classrooms have been built without government involvement, and it is unclear what condition Iran’s educational space would be in without the help of “school-building philanthropists.”
Source: DW
