12-09-16 PM Tsipras gives ministry excellent grade of 20 for school opening

The country’s 13 regional Educational Directors gave Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras the overall picture of the start of the school year during a teleconference at the Education Ministry today. Education Minister Nikos Filis, Alternate Minister Sia Anagnostopoulou, Deputy Minister Theodosis Pelegrinis, ministry General Secretary Yannis Pantis, General Secretary of Lifelong Learning and Youth Pausanias Papageorgiou, and Panagiotis Katsaros were all in attendance.

“The Education Ministry gets the [top] excellent grade of 20!” Prime Minister Tsipras declared at the end of his briefing.

Earlier, the regional directors presented data about the student population, schools and teachers, noting that schools nationwide opened without a hitch, except in isolated cases such as the island of Thasos, where schools are shut today and tomorrow due to the devastating weekend fire. On Friday, Muslim minority schools will open due to the ongoing religious holiday.

The directors stressed that Special Education schools opened with the 12 September blessing and not in October, as in past years.

The Educational Director of Central Greece said that when parents were alerted by the Special Education School in Haironeia, Boeotia that their children would come for the blessing on the first day of classes, they could not believe it, as the school always opened in October in the past.

The large number of early substitute hirings contributed to the unimpeded start of schools even in small islands such as Leipsoi, Arkioi, Gavdos, and Kastelorizo. Even a kindergarten with one student, in the Lesvos village of Sigri, and a school in Thymaina, had teachers and operated smoothly.

The prime minister inquired about the remote schools in Vovousa near Ioannina and in Ereikousa, an islet near Corfu, and greeted the news that teachers were in place even there. 

The successful school openings were attributed to the education ministry and its services¨ effective planning. The regional directors spoke of a year-long struggle that culminated in mid-August, allowing a timely opening of schools.

Following the teleconference, Minister Filis said that this achievement was due to months of planning, hard work, and cooperation. ” We attempted to transcend problems that arise from the prevalent mentality because there is a tendency to push school openings later, and we confronted that. It is a lesson to all of us that good planning in the education system and in public administration more generally is feasible and can bear immediate results. It is also a result of the cooperation between the ministries of education, of the interior, of development, and of finance, so as to achieve a major mobilisation of the state machine and to accomplish something that in fiscally tough times the government set as a priority, the upgrading of education - to create a school that combines quality with equality,” Filis said. Addressing ministry staff, he said that, “The battle we waged aimed at victory in the overall war, for the upgrading of democratic education and public schools.”

Alexis Tsipras΄statements – We must achieve schools of quality and equality. Today, we achieved something self-evident that for years was not a given.

Thanking the minister and education ministry staff, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said, “We had made a great wager, to return in this school year to normalcy, to approach normalcy and go beyond it. I hear from you that not only did we manage to open schools on time, but also to have in place more substitute teachers than in any other year. Hence, we are going beyond the cycle of crisis and returning to normalcy. Now the bar is even higher. Today we won the first battle, the bet, and in the test we put to the education ministry we did exceptionally well. The great war from hereon in is to win a school of quality and equality, since today we achieved a self-evident goal which for years was not a given.”

Tsipras said that the great, daily struggle is for “the public school to be a quality school in which students, boys and girls, receive substantial education, and not to be an appendage of private tutoring schools, not to be a test centre but a place where the youth of our country acquire the important good of knowledge, which is the most important asset in the difficult days of the next period of their lives after school, when in tough conditions of intense competition, knowledge is the highest asset. It must also be a place in which children, regardless of religion or background will receive a Hellenic education, and in that sense they will acquire knowledge of the culture, mores and civilization of our country.”

Finally, the PM underlined that the results had surprised even the most incredulous, and perhaps some will find it difficult to make this a news item, and that is the best news. “Excellent grade of 20,” is how PM Tsipras graded the result, addressing the minister.