In Rural Russia, ‘Closing Schools is Easy but Re-Opening Them is Hard,’ Residents Say

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 17 – Closing village schools which often have only a few or even only one pukepil is relatively easy: Under Putin era regulations, any school with fewer than 30 pupils can be closed by fiat; and more than half of the rural schools in existence in 2000 have now been closed.
    Moscow argues that such closures and the consolidation that follows are not only economically justified but are the only way to provide young Russians with more educational opportunities, including Internet connectivity and the opportunity for those in consolidated schools to study a far greater variety of subjects.
    But both the employees of these schools, who often outnumber the students, and the residents of the villages more generally actively oppose such closures because they know that “closing schools is easy but re-opening them is hard” and that if the school shuts down, so too will the village.
    Consequently, they resist. Takiye Dela journalist Ksenisya Shorokhova reports on a school in the Siberian village of Ponomarevka where there is only one pupil left but where seven people are employed to give her an education and where residents hope keeping the school open will mean that their village can recover (takiedela.ru/2024/11/nikuda-my-bez-tebya/).
    They fear that if the school is closed, their village and its way of life will be under a death sentence; and so they are resisting. Local officials are supporting them where they can and apparently taking what steps are open to them to keep the school open so that their village and all its residents will have a future.
    For them, that possibility is far more important than any talk of economic rationality.