From the Liveblog of
Thursday, March 28, 2024
High-school students stage one-day ‘warning strike’ over school funding
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleGavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
A one-day walkout organized by Israel’s National Student and Youth Council calls for high-school students to stay home today in protest over unresolved salary negotiations between the Finance Ministry and the Teachers’ Union.
The students call for “a stable education system for the long term, a system that will have quality teachers who earn a decent living, a system in which subjects will not be canceled due to teacher shortages,” and decry the lack of an agreement over teachers’ salaries.
“This strike is a warning. We will disrupt the public agenda in order to end the ongoing postponement of a signed agreement,” the Student and Youth Council says in a statement.
High-school students are being used as a “bargaining chip” in the struggle between the Finance Ministry and the teachers, the council continues, and have suffered from an education system that hasn’t met the challenges posed by COVID-19, years-long political stalemates, and now the Israel-Hamas conflict.
“Hundreds of thousands of high schoolers” are participating in the strike today, a youth council spokesperson tells The Times of Israel, in “every corner of the country” and including students from Arabic, ultra-Orthodox and National Religious school tracks.
“Today schools are open as usual and the teachers are there. Any students not attending will be counted as absent,” a ministry spokesperson tells The Times of Israel.
According to the Education Ministry, there are nearly 500,000 9th- to 12th-graders in Israel.
The Times of Israel Community.