School year starts with half a million children stuck at home amid teachers’ strike
Over 2.5 million K-12 students in total registered for the new year, with 179,300 starting first grade; special security measures in place in north and south due to war
Over two million children began a new school year on Sunday morning while another half a million stayed at home, their classrooms shuttered due to a teachers’ strike.
Intense, last-minute negotiations between the Education Ministry and the Secondary Schools Teachers Association on Saturday night failed to reach a breakthrough in a long-running dispute over wages and work contracts, leading the union to go ahead with a promised strike that was officially announced on Thursday.
“Around half a million students from 10th to 12th grade” are affected by the strike, the Education Ministry confirmed to The Times of Israel on Sunday morning.
Some 514,000 students are registered at high schools for the upcoming school year and 335,000 at middle schools, according to ministry statistics.
In total, there are 2,558,000 children in the school system, including 535,000 children in kindergarten and state daycare. A total of 1.174 million are registered for elementary school.
As schools opened Sunday morning, some 179,300 children started first grade. At the other end of the system, there are 144,000 students registered for 12th grade this year, their final year.
Some 526,000 students are registered in the state-run ultra-Orthodox education track, and 530,000 in the Arabic track, the ministry said. In total, the system supports 5,743 schools, 22,000 kindergartens and 5,533 daycare centers, with a budget for the 2024-25 school year of NIS 83.6 billion ($23 billion).
The teachers’ strike impacted grades 10-12 nationwide, though institutions dedicated to special education students were excluded. Some 9th-grade classes were also affected in certain schools, at the discretion of school principals.
The strike was not in effect in some areas in the north and south of the country amid the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip and spiraling violence with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The threat of rocket attacks from Gaza remains, while Hezbollah has carried out near-daily rocket and drone attacks since October, when the war started with the terror group Hamas’s devastating attack on Israel.
The teachers union said there would be no strike in Merhavim, Ofakim, Netivot, Ein Habesor, Sha’ar Hanegev, Shikma, and Sderot, all in the south, as well as Majdal Shams, Kabir, and Nofei Golan in the north.
In the north, the Israel Defense Forces and local security response teams guarded school bus pickup points and the institutions themselves.
The IDF also increased the territory covered by its air defense units to protect areas between communities where school buses travel. Air defenses usually only engage an incoming target if it is determined to be heading for an urban area.
Authorities have also set up more small public bomb shelter booths in the north. However, the Kan public broadcaster reported that many parents said they would not send their children to school as they feel the measures are not enough.
Meanwhile, about 17,000 school-aged children are among the tens of thousands of people who remain displaced from their homes near the border with Lebanon. They will continue to attend existing local schools or popup institutions near the rented apartments, hotel or relatives’ home where they have been staying since October.
The teachers’ union has been engaged in negotiations with the education and finance ministries, with instructors demanding retroactive wage increases and other benefits that were agreed upon before the last school year began, but which were deferred due to Hamas’s attack and the outbreak of war.
The union is also seeking a collective salary agreement, a major sticking point in the negotiations, while the government has pushed for individual contracts for teachers amid a budgetary shortfall.
Last-ditch talks on Saturday made no progress.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has vowed to not pay striking teachers, while Kan reported that the union has millions of shekels in a compensation fund that it could use to pay the strikers, though Education Ministry sources estimated it is not enough to last more than a few days.
Strikes over salary disputes delaying the start of school studies have become commonplace in Israel.
Last year, with mere hours to go before the start of the school year, high school teachers and government officials reached a deal to bump up salaries, avoiding a threatened strike that would have delayed classes.
But the government later failed to honor those agreements, citing the cuts brought on by the war.
The 2024 budget slashed millions of shekels in funding from government ministries, including the Education Ministry, instead directing them toward displaced residents of the south and north amid the war.
The Education Ministry faced a cut of NIS 38,283,000 ($10.3 million) in July.
