Galery

1

Students began to leave private schools and to enter public ones because their parents can not afford to pay high fees because of the economic crisis. This is seen still from kindergartens - parents are increasingly looking for places in public kindergartens. The applications in municipalities are so many but there are no enough vacancies in the kindergartens.

The crisis has finally struck private schools and according to data for the new school year there is a decline in enrollment for primary classes, which is expected to be higher than 25%.

In the intermediate grades the drop is about 15% even for the most popular private schools that have drawn up waiting lists in the past, and now are filling their classes with difficulty. “Once there were queues of parents and now we party if somebody shows up,” says a teacher from a prestigious private school for the Ethnos newspaper.  

1. About 95,000 students or 7% of the students in the country study in 500 private schools.

2. The private schools are not only for wealthy parents, for example, the smaller schools in the neighborhoods teach children of the middle class, whose parents are paying with their surplus mainly to feel safe for the transport, but also because these private kindergartens and schools have fewer children of immigrants.

3. Only a few of the 500 private schools in the country are in the elite category with incredibly high fees. Most of the schools have less students and middle class parents can afford to send their children there. These schools will obviously suffer the biggest strike of the crisis as there will always be wealthy parents from the affluent part of the society who can pay for expensive private schools.

Many schools are threatened to close, and many teachers will remain unemployed. The difficult period that the country runs through and the increases in tuition fees seem unattainable luxury to the families. “Probably it is time the owners of the schools to decide to look at their schools not as businesses but as nuclei for production of public wealth,” said the President of the Association of Teachers in Private Schools Michalis Kurutos. According to him, in order to survive the private schools the relationship between the owners and the teachers working in medieval conditions must change, the fees have to decrease which will show that the owners are able to adapt to the new economic environment.