School Housing Problems

The month of December marked a period of agitations in education, that were not necessarily connected with the one-year memorial of the murdered student Alexandros Grigoropoulos, but with the critical housing shortages for many schools in our area. Thus we had student take-overs in the Iraklion School of Arts and the Gouves High School.  Such a take-over was narrowly avoided in the Kokkini Hani Grammar School but we had plenty of rallies, interventions in the press and in television and communications with different agencies.

One of many crowded meetings
concerning the school situation

As we see the situation, after a recent meeting of involved agencies and institutions, there are two basic reasons for this extremely critical housing problem: First, it's the permanent inactivity of a bureaucratic government which combined with cuts in funds, is not acceptable. And, we are not just talking about this period of economic crisis, because we must all bear in mind that we haven't had a new school in some municipalities for many years.

In Gouves, for example, astonishingly it's been since 1974!  And, speaking of Gouves, the municipality collects from the Prefecture roughly 16,000 Euros annually, for school maintenance expenses, while the expenditures are in the order of 80 to 90,000 euros. On a larger scale, the recent total needs of the Iraklion Prefecture to cover school housing are 22 million euros for purchasing land and 34 million euros to rebuild. But, the Prefecture has received less than two million euros!

The population increase throughout many municipalities creates additional needs. In Gouves, according to a 2004 survey, the municipality leads in population increase in all of Crete and it's third in all of Greece.

Even the feeblest mind can comprehend that where the social needs increase so swiftly, the State must be committed to contribute proportionally; otherwise growth is condemned to a perpetual "patching up" of things rather than building something new.

What kind of future can we expect for our children?