Uptick in Birthrate Seven Years Ago and Continuing Influx of Immigrants Overwhelming Russian Schools

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 10 – The slight uptick in birthrates in Russia in the mid-2010s and the continuing influx of immigrant children have combined with the failure of the Russian authorities to repair existing schools means that at present Russia lacks approximately 900,000 places for students and has been forced to expand class sizes and go to double or triple shifts.

            Teacher salaries have not gone up, and overworked instructors, especially in the early grades, are now increasingly thinking about leaving the profession, an attitude that will make the current problems even worse soon, the To Be Precise portal says (tochno.st/materials/v-rossiyskikh-shkolakh-ne-khvataet-900-tysyach-mest-i-eto-tolko-odna-iz-problem-vo-mnogikh-zdaniyakh-net-kanalizatsii-i-tsentralnogo-otopleniya).

            Every third school in Russia needs significant reconstruction, the portal found. Even more lack central heating or indoor toilets. The situation in this regard is especially bad east of the Urals and in smaller cities. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, there are problems but they are far less serious.

            But the cities have not escaped the problem entirely. In places where migrants are most numerous and now live in virtual ghettos, the situation of school shortages is even more severe than in rural parts of Siberia and the Russian Far East, To Be Precise continues, a pattern that shows the unmet costs of immigration in Russia.

            For the country as a whole, fewer than one percent of all schools are in such bad shape that they must be torn down and replaced. But in some regions and especially in non-Russian republics in the North Caucasus and Asia, the share is larger, six to eight percent, and will only increase given that too little attention is being given to reconstruction.