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NEWS
Injustice Addressed - Unoccupied Classrooms in Ramat Beit Shemesh Secular School Transferred to Chareidi Chinuch
By Y. Shain
The 5775 school year was opened successfully last week in Beit Shemesh when the city began implementing the solution to an injustice which has been ongoing for many years: the secular Safot VeTarbuyot ("Languages and Cultures") school located in the heart of the chareidi neighborhood of Ramat Beit Shemesh A was partially evacuated in favor of the Mishkenot Daat Bais Yaakov school which lacks decent facilities. The process was one sided, after extended attempts of dialogue on the part of the municipality with the school administration and the Education Ministry fell on deaf and very prejudiced ears with regards to the suffering of the school population. "We acted on the basis of a tough and determined decision that enough had been said and we had crossed the red line," declared the chairman of the Planning and Construction Committee, Rabbi Moshe Montag, who was the driving force of this effort.
The actions of the city were challenged in court by the Ministry of Education, but the judge found in favor of the city and even said, "If this had happened in Givatayim you would not be in court."
The Mishkenot Yaakov school is one of the three major Chinuch Atzmai schools in Beit Shemesh, numbering some 300 students. To date, the school has received only eight classrooms, with the remainder of the students dispersed in temporary facilities under substandard and very cramped conditions. The city administration harshly criticizes the policies of the Education and Interior Ministries which is blind and deaf to the needs of the chareidi public because of several loud-mouthed individuals, and they refuse to address the problem of overcrowding, as contrasted to many government schools in Beit Shemesh occupying large, spacious buildings in reverse proportion to their needs.
The Safot VeTarbuyot school was opened ten years ago in a new building constructed in the heart of the chareidi neighborhood of Ramat Beit Shemesh A. The then mayor, Danny Vaknin, who tried to arrest the growth of the neighborhoods of the chareidi public, and intended to stem the blessed development by allotting many educational facilities to the secular and government-religious networks, despite the fact that its student body did not even live in the neighborhood. The secular school now numbers a mere 144 students, most of them residents of the original neighborhoods of Beit Shemesh and nearby settlements. In recent years, half of the building, designed for about 500 students, has remained empty.
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