The academic year is a month old, but thousands of Greek schools remain closed because of a chronic shortage of teachers, textbooks and paper.
Two out of every ten teaching posts remain vacant across the country’s 7,878 primary and secondary schools, leaving tens of thousands of pupils unschooled, in one of the biggest crises for Greek youngsters in decades.
The shortage is most acute in specialist schools for children with learning difficulties or who are physically disabled. Since the start of the financial crisis in 2009, more than 8,500 full-time state teachers, who are classed as civil servants, have either lost their jobs after mass redundancies or opted for early retirement before sweeping pension cuts. Only 282 of those teaching jobs have been filled since then, with the education ministry preferring instead to hire part-time substitute teachers to keep costs down.
The shortages triggered a sit-in by angry pupils at a school this week in the mountainous region of Anogia. In Athens, hundreds of unemployed teachers marched on the Ministry of Education waving flags and chanting slogans demanding they be hired to ease the crisis. On the island of Crete, more than 200 schools recorded a shortage of 1,700 teachers this week.
“We’re missing a language teacher, a maths teacher and a gym teacher,” one parent told the local Mega television station. “How are our children expected to prepare for university exams?”
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State funding for education has been halved to less than 2 per cent of GDP since the start of the financial crisis.
The Ministry of Education said it hoped to hire 12,000 temporary teaching staff by the end of the week. But even that, experts predict, will not be enough. “We foresee more than 3,000 positions remaining vacant throughout the year,” said Thanassis Kikinis, head of the Federation of Primary School Teachers. “The situation, though, is ever more harrowing in schools for the disabled.”
There, almost none of the 4,000 vacant jobs have been filled since September, allowing only 14,000 of the country’s 240,000 disabled children to attend schools that cater for those with special needs this year.
Yannis Voutsinas, president of the parents’ association of disabled children in the greater Attica region, said: “The government promised to have specialists in place by October 15. We haven’t seen any.”
In Papamakaristos, one of the capital’s oldest schools for the disabled, administrators complain of sweeping shortages of specialist staff.
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“There are supposed to be 12 teachers but only nine are in place,” Mr Kikinis said. “Facilities are worn down and psychotherapists are nowhere to be seen.” Administrators at other schools for the disabled complain of shabby buildings and shortages of supplies.
“We demand the government press ahead with mass hiring to cover not just the teaching needs for this year but those bound to emerge in 2016,” said Eleni Zografaki of the Greek teachers’ union.“It’s the duty of every government to invest in the future.”