Aya, who is seven years and 10 months old, could not start school this year because the village’s school only accepts eight-year-olds. “The life of our children is being wasted and we do not know who to complain to,” says Mahmud Mahrouss, Aya’s father. “The enrollment application officer in the village’s only school has refused to enroll Aya this year because she has not yet turned eight, which is unfair because the school entrance age in nearby villages is six.”

Small school

Aya, who is seven years and 10 months old, could not start school this year because the village’s school only accepts eight-year-olds. “The life of our children is being wasted and we do not know who to complain to,” says Mahmud Mahrouss, Aya’s father. “The enrollment application officer in the village’s only school has refused to enroll Aya this year because she has not yet turned eight, which is unfair because the school entrance age in nearby villages is six.”

Small school

Headmaster Saad Abdulmoneim insists that the school is only 600 square meters, says Abdulmoneim, and it only has seven 30-meter classrooms. It hosts 858 students distributed into two shifts, with seven classes each.

“The number of students who have applied to join school this year is about 350 students but we have only accepted 180 – the rest have been postponed to the next year,” says Abdulmoneim. “We put no fewer than 60 students in each classroom. We demand that the ministry solve this problem.”

Students continue their education in the school up to the fifth grade. Afterwards, they have to move to schools in the nearby village of Maabda to get their primary education certificate.

Delayed education

“My daughter will join school next year when she is nine years old, which will impact her life and educational in comparison with her cohorts who joined school when they were six,” says Mahrouss. “We are the only village that has this problem. The nearest school is two kilometres away, but we do not allow our children to go there because the country is not safe due to problems and atrocities.”

Aya is very sad because she will not be able to join school this year. “I want to go to school like my coeval cousin who has joined school this year,” says Aya.

“Another cousin of Aya lives in Maabda which has five schools,” says Mahrouss. “She joined school when she was six and she is now in the third grade.”

Common case

Aya’s case is not unique. “I have had to enroll my daughter Nada in a school in Maabda although it is five kilometers away and the means of transportation is not safe.  A lot of accidents have happened,” says Sharif Zahri, one of the village’s residents.

The large number of students in classrooms and the raised school entrance age have led many children to drop out. “When I turned seven, my father applied to enroll me in school but they said ‘wait until he turns eight’,” says 18-year-old Ahmed Abdullah. “However, a year later, I got older and did not join school.”

Owners’ refusal

“I filed a complaint to the Abnub Directorate of Education (ADoE) and the Ministry of Education (MoE) but nothing happened because the owners of the school’s land refuse to renew it since they want it back from the Educational Building Authority (EBA), says Mahrouss. “Villagers offered to buy the land to rebuild the school but one of the owners refused and no one of the villagers donated a plot to build a new school on due to the very few lands they own and poverty.”

ADoE Director Rashad Abdulhay says the problem of Izbet Mohamed Khalil can be solved through collecting the price of the land for the owners and allocating it to the EBA like we did with the school of the village of Kom Mansoura through collecting L.E. 80,000. “Neither the EBA nor the MoE will buy the land from the owners because they have not done such a thing since 2005,” he says.

The problem, says Abdulhay, will be partially solved next year with the opening of the 40-classroom school of the village of Houshet Shaqalqeel which is only three kilometers away from Izbet Mohamed Khalil. The number of schools in Abnub and its villages is 246 schools: 66 primary schools, 40 middle schools, 13 high schools and 127 community and private schools. The number of first graders is 10,000.

Izbet Mohamed Khalil has a population of 7,000 and Maabda 68,000. Abnub and its villages has 392,602 according to Ahmed Abdussalam, Abnub’s Mayor.

Breaking the law

Director of the Egyptian Center for the Right to Education (ECRE) Abdulhafez Tayel says the problem of the school of Izbet Mohamed Khalil is an outright violation of the law. “Article 15 of the Education Law No. 139 of 1981 stipulates that: ‘Primary education is a right to all Egyptian children when they turn six. The state shall realize this right and parents shall implement it,” says Tayel. “Raising the school entrance age is a punishable crime and an offence the MoE and the government should be held accountable for.”

Tayel says 7,000 villages in Egypt have no schools and their children are forced to walk a few kilometers to reach the nearest school due to a lack of good transportation networks. “There are 27,000 school buildings in Egypt but in the records they are registered as 48,000 buildings because some of them have two shifts,” he says. “However, Egypt needs 810,000 classrooms or nearly 27,000-30,000 schools.”

Tayel stresses that the dilemma of that school aggravates dropping out. Based on ECRE’s statistics, says Tayel, 30 percent of Egypt’s 18 million children are dropouts although the MoE says the dropout rate does not exceed 10 percent.

Mahrouss concludes that the problem can be solved through dedicating a government plot near Atallah Canal to build a new school where the existing overhead power lines can be moved to another place.