Thousands of Palestinian students in East Jerusalem are being denied access to free public education, although they are entitled to it by Israeli law. In East Jerusalem there is a shortage of over 1,000 classrooms.
The shortage of classrooms in East Jerusalem has been deliberated a number of times in recent years in the High Court of Justice, which ruled that the Ministry of Education and the Jerusalem Municipality must build hundreds of classrooms for the Palestinian students in East Jerusalem. However, in spite of repeated commitments to the Court by the government to meet these requirements and to build the hundreds of necessary classrooms, these commitments have not been fulfilled, and the classroom shortage has steadily worsened
As a result of the severe shortage of classrooms in East Jerusalem, the municipal school system is unable to absorb all the children who want to register to study in the system. Every year MANHI (the Jerusalem Municipal Education Administration) rejects a large number of Palestinian children from East Jerusalem who want to register for the public education system, due to lack of space in the educational institutions. This defies the law as well as the regulations of the director general of the Ministry of Education.
By the year 2010, only about half of the Palestinian children in East Jerusalem – about 40,700 out of about 90,000 students – presently study in the municipal school system. About 40,000 Palestinian children in East Jerusalem study in private or unofficial schools. These schools are operated by churches, the Waqf, the United Nations and various Palestinian groups. Studies in many of these schools are quite expensive. Approximately 5,500 students are not registered in any of the above mentioned frameworks
MANHI does not record rejected registration requests, and therefore there are no accurate statistics regarding the number of students who wish to study in the municipal school system, but for whom no place is found.
Neglect of the physical infrastructure of the public educational system in East Jerusalem has worsened over the years until it has reached the crisis point; today, it is necessary to build thousands of additional classrooms overnight in order to accommodate the needs of residents.
The situation has deteriorated even further as a result of construction of the Separation Barrier in Jerusalem.
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