"Bury rural education": why did Ukraine decide to close almost all educational institutions in villages?.

Small rural schools will be closed in Ukraine. The process will begin soon.

School education in villages is expected to change in the near future and they will begin in 2025. In 2026, the active, albeit painful, process will be accelerated.

The point is that in Ukraine they will be forced to close educational institutions in villages in which very few children study — less than 45-60 students. The Ministry of Education and the Verkhovna Rada believe that schools with too few children do not provide an adequate level of education and, most importantly, they are unprofitable.

She told about this in an interview with News. LIVE deputy-"servant" Yulia Hryshyna.

As she notes, the process of urbanization of the population began in Ukraine not today, but has been going on for a very long time. Young people are forced to leave the villages for the cities. The birth rate in villages has fallen markedly , there are fewer and fewer children in rural areas, and, accordingly, schools are empty. They have two or three dozen students for the whole school, and in some years there is not a single first-grader in such schools.

"When a school has 10-15-40 or even 100 children of different classes, what quality of education can we talk about? Often in such schools, one teacher can teach several subjects at the same time. Therefore, later we have a low quality of education from such schools," says Yulia Hryshyna.

Therefore, the process of gradual closure of rural schools did not begin today. Unfortunately, this is an objective reality. Of course, rural children are not left without education. They are taken by bus to hub schools every day.

"If you don't have a school, you don't have a village." But the process is irreversible

From 2025, the process of closing small schools will be accelerated. From September 1, 2025, budget funding for schools with less than 45 students will stop. And from the next school year, that is, from September 1, 2026, schools with less than 60 children will stop funding.

Of course, villagers are very sensitive to the fact that the school is closed. After all, it is not for nothing that they say that the village has prospects, and it lives as long as it has a school. If there is no school, young people will not stay in the village either.

"In general, the process is painful, because they say that if there is no school in a village, there is no village. You need to understand why this is happening. After all, schools in the format of less than 45 children cannot work efficiently," the MP concluded.

On average, 200-250 rural schools are closed in Ukraine per year. Under-filled schools are being closed, and hub schools are appearing, which should have new equipment and qualified teachers, the New Ukrainian School informs.

IN 2022, 153 RURAL SCHOOLS WERE CLOSED. HALF OF THEM ARE BEGINNERS

Due to the optimization of the rural network, according to the Ministry of Education and Science, as of June 1, 2022, 1,241 hub schools and 1,794 branches were operating. Obviously, if the institution is designed for 300 children, and three students attend classes, it is not profitable to maintain it. Therefore, small schools are closed in communities, directing material and financial resources to hub institutions.

The hub school should be equipped with modern classrooms, the Internet, and each class should have from 15 to 30 students. Small schools are turned into branches of a hub institution: for the most part, these are primary or secondary levels. In this case, high school students go to study at the hub school by school bus. Its work should be organized by local authorities.

However, villagers do not always agree to the liquidation of the school, especially when it comes to primary school. Unfortunately, they are most often closed. Thus, in the information system of education management "Ukraine. EMIS" local authorities publish data on liquidated secondary education institutions. After analyzing the figures for 2022 (not including schools in the temporarily occupied territories), the New Ukrainian School counted 153 closed schools in rural areas, half of them are just primary schools.

Ternopil region "lost" the most, where 22 schools were closed.

In Khmelnytskyi oblast, 15 schools stopped working.

In Zhytomyr, Kirovohrad and Lviv regions, there are 12 schools in each region.

In Cherkasy and Mykolaiv regions, 11 schools were closed.

In Vinnytsia region – 10

There are 5 schools in Poltava region.

In Sumy and Zakarpattia, 4 schools were closed.

There are 2 schools in Bukovyna and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

In Ivano-Frankivsk and Rivne oblasts – 1 school each.

According to the Institute of Educational Analytics, in 2021, there were 8,446 educational institutions in rural areas, where 1.1 million students studied and 180 thousand teachers worked.

But almost a third of schools in villages are underfilled. Thus, the explanatory note to the draft law on the possibility of using school premises after the closure of the school (more on this later) states that as of September 5, 2019, there were 3,900 under-filled schools in Ukraine, where the class size was 9 or less. In 2021, according to regional state administrations, there were already 2,558 such schools. That is, in three years, the number of under-filled schools has decreased by 1,342.

The day before, we wrote about a number of innovations in educational institutions of Ukraine. Some of them are currently being implemented in Zakarpattia, in particular, we are talking about an enhanced security system in educational institutions of Zakarpattia. Modern panic buttons have already been installed in local schools in Uzhhorod and Mukachevo.

We also wrote about the strict access regime that is being introduced in educational institutions of Ukraine. Each school will have a police officer.

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