Despite Moscow’s Denials, Schools in Muslim North Caucasus So Overcrowded that Many Operate on a Three-Shift Schedule

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 28 – Since Putin came to office in 2000, Russia has closed 28,000 of the 68,000 schools it had then. Most of these closures are in predominantly ethnic Russian areas where birthrates are low, and consequently, such schools have too few students to justify keeping them open.

            Every fall when a new school year starts, this phenomenon attracts enormous attention in the Russian media especially because of the way in which Moscow closes these schools down – first threatening closure, then not providing sufficient funds to maintain them, and then arguing that they must be closed for safety reasons (okno.group/school-selo/).

            But while schools in Russian regions are emptying out and being closed, schools in Muslim regions of the Russian Federation and especially in the North Caucasus are busting at the scenes with the number of pupils up dramatically, class size increasing far beyond the norm, and the schools themselves forced to operate in shifts, often two and sometimes even three.

            Moscow officials deny that there are any schools operating with a schedule of three shifts a day, although reports from the North Caucasus suggest that such schools are a commonplace there, with two shifts rather than the normal one being the standard that overworked teachers have to cope with (newizv.ru/news/2024-08-28/rozhayte-a-gde-shkoly-na-yuge-rossii-deti-opyat-budut-uchitsya-v-tri-smeny-432877).

            Sadly, the Russian government in Moscow shows no interest in transferring money to regions where the number of pupils is rising and where they must study at odd hours required by a two-shift or three-shift schedule. Instead, the quality of education in such regions continue to deteriorate.

            Instead, as Novyye izvestiya reports, officials there are happy to continue to lie because to do otherwise would call attention to something that is even more disturbing to the Kremlin than the schools – a demographic divide between the declining number of ethnic Russians and the rising number of Muslim citizens in the Russian Federation.