East Jerusalem's education crisis

Israel's main civil rights group is planning a mass protest to highlight the inadequate provision of classrooms and school places in East Jerusalem. Tim Franks has been to meet some of the children who do have places in public classrooms, but finds the conditions in which they are being taught to be crowded and unsafe.

It is best to wear sturdy shoes to reach the overflow wing of Shuafat Elementary School for Girls. You get to the entrance over a small hillock of rubble and broken glass.

Most of the pupils at the girls' school live in the Shuafat refugee camp

It has been that way for the last 15 years, the length of time that the school has been open.

Two hundred and eighty-five girls between the ages of six and 10 are crammed into a house, which was built as a home for a single family.

We arrived just as the morning lessons came to an end. The children were, in some cases, literally tumbling down the stairs. Stairs that Abdel Karim Laafi, the head of the East Jerusalem Parents' Association, told us did not even meet local fire regulations (they are too narrow).

We backed into the bare concrete walls in an attempt to avoid the skittering mass of girls.

One small girl was knocked to the floor as a teetering pile of school chairs by the front door collapsed on top of her.

Lack of facilities

We went into the room where seven-year-old Mana al-Muri studies, along with 37 other girls. It is an enclosed veranda. There are three children wedged behind each small desk.

Outside are the three toilets, the only three for the entire school

The air-conditioning, for the long, hot summer is a small fan attached to the wall at the front.

The heating for the winter - which can get bitterly cold - is a small electric heater towards the back of the room. The walls are bare.

It is, as Mana told us in a small voice, "not comfortable".

Outside are the three toilets, the only three for the entire school. There was another toilet next to Mana's classroom, but it has been converted into the room for the children with special needs.

We were shown in. It smelled, strongly, of dust and mould. It was crammed with unwanted mess from the rest of the school.

For the children there was one bench up against the wall.

'Irredeemable mess'

Ali Swalem is the man who rents the house to City Hall.

"I do care," he told us. "I don't like it, but it's good money. This year I didn't want to rent it, but the board of education pleaded with me. In the end I gave them one more year, because the kids do need the classrooms."

Ali has the cracked, gravelly voice and the raucous laugh of someone who has seen the system, thinks it is an irredeemable mess, and that he might as well make the most of it.

The case of the Shuafat Elementary school for girls is not isolated.

In June, The Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) submitted a petition to Israel's Supreme Court to try to force the Jerusalem Municipality to provide adequate access to education in East Jerusalem.

The petition quotes from a report commissioned by City Hall six years ago, which predicted a shortage now of at least 1,500 classrooms.

As of last year, fewer than 200 had been built.

Classroom shortfall

A bare classroom at the Shuafat elementary school for boys

Only half of East Jerusalem's school children are enrolled in the state system.

Despite the poverty of the population in that half of the city, the rest of the children are either in private or unofficial schools.

An estimated 9,000 - more than one in 10 - are thought not to be going to any school.

The petition quotes from a letter to the mayor from the city's own legal adviser at the end of last year. The legal adviser baldly described the provision of education in East Jerusalem as discriminatory and illegal.

In an e-mail to us, the Jerusalem board of education conceded that there was a shortfall in classrooms, but they insisted that they were moving to solve the problems and that East Jerusalem receives proportionally just as many resources as West Jerusalem.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel disputes that.

Unequal provisions

Jalal Hussein has withdrawn his child from school

In any case, while their petition before the Supreme Court case makes its slow progress, Jalal Hussein and the other parents at the new elementary school for boys in Shuafat, have taken matters into their own hands. They are on strike.

The school year only began last week, but after one day Jalal and the parents of the other pupils withdrew their children.

It was not just that the school was a barely converted storage centre for goats, with stinking, broken waste pipes, and rooms that had chairs but no tables for the children. It was that the fumes from the huge metals factory at the back of the school were giving the children blinding headaches.

Jerusalem is - in the view of the state of Israel - the country's undivided capital city.

That is not the view of the mainly Arab or Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. Most of them boycott local elections, although they are expected to pay the same local taxes as the more affluent neighbourhoods of Jewish West Jerusalem.

You might think that would give them the same provision of public services. It does not.

When it comes to education, East Jerusalem remains a class apart.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 6 September, 2008 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.