On Thursday, the 8th of June, Latvian Association of Local Governments (LPS) advisor for education and culture affairs Ināra Dundure, said in an interview on LTV Rīta Panorāma that the offer for the school network by the Latvia’s Ministry of Education and Science (IZM) means completely breaking the existing education system, which “has been carefully built step by step”.
She explained that it is currently planned to create a network of schools, saying that the state will determine where the 7th-12th grades should be. This means that the municipality can’t plan how to modernize the school, what to do, what investments to make, Dundure added.
“We re-analyzed the school network and we see how empty the territories remain. In fact, a situation is created that young families, even those who return, have to wonder if they can return to their birth home, because the closest school is very far away,” Dundure said.
The LPS emphasizes that a total of 401 schools have been closed in Latvia over the past 23 years, but
IN THE 2021/2022 ACADEMIC YEAR – 166 SCHOOLS ARE REORGANIZED.
The work of lmunicipalities continues, calculating demographic and other data, Dundure said.
As reported, by optimizing the school network, around 100 schools could lose the current level of education in the 7th-12th grade education stage, according to the IZM. It offers criteria for “creating an effective school network”. The main indicators characterizing an effective and sustainable school network, according to the IZM, are accessibility depending on the stage of education, the number of students in class groups depending on the density of students in the municipality, and the capacity of teaching staff.
20 educational institutions, due to distance or population density, are defined as exceptions to which the developed criteria would not apply.