Interior Minister Aryeh Deri signed off on allowing a loan that will allow the Municipality of Jerusalem to borrow one billion shekels in order to build 1,000 more classrooms for the cities students. The classrooms will be up to standards of the Ministry of Education, something that many of the city’s current educational facilities don’t meet.

The new classrooms will alleviate a lot of the pressure on current schools due to the lack of space. Currently, the city has some 4,092 classrooms that serve more than 100,000 students.

With the treasury and the Ministry of Education both supposedly shirking their responsibility to provide an adequate amount of classrooms to comply with the city’s needs and its growing population. Mayor Nir Barkat said that a unique financial model was used in order to facilitate the loan from a number of sources. These sources include Bank Leumi as well as other banks and financial institutions. The city, thus far, has been renting extra classroom space for an exorbitant price with sums reaching up to 140 million NIS annually.

Deri said that the current state of affairs is highly inappropriate, with children learning in buildings that are not fit for that use.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)