East Jerusalem's education crisis 
t 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.

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.

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.

...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).

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. 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...

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

...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

The school year only began last week, but after one day Jalal Hussein 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.

Broadcast on Sat 6 September 2008 on BBC Radio 4. 

Original report from BBC here 

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