By Ajnadin Mustapha .
Tunis, 6 March 2015:
Schools educating for Libyan expatriate children —particularly in Tunisia, which has received the majority of Libyan refugees . . .[restrict]over the past several months—are running out of money
According to the cultural attache for the Libyan Embassy in Tunisia, Dr Hisham Abushala, teachers have not received salaries from the Libyan government since October, because the antigovernment of Omer Al-Hassi has occupied the ministries in Tripoli and is refusing to recognise the schools and disburse any funding.
Abushala said he had found a way to pay the teachers for two of the past four months. However, he warned that those monies will certainly not last much longer.
“We take the responsibility of educating Libya’s children very seriously ” he said, “but as the government in Tripoli has severed all ties to the Libyan embassies that have refused to recognise its authority as legitimate, funding for the schools will soon dry up completely”.
Another problem facing the schools is that those in Tunisia’s capital are receiving a disproportionate number of students in comparison to the schools in Hammamet, Sfax, Mahdia and Sousse. In one case, there are fewer than 25 students attending an outlying school—hardly enough to justify hiring a full teaching staff.
“We’ve recently been trying to convince parents to move to Sousse to fill up the school there, which opened in December, but everyone seems to be flocking to the capital,” said Abushala.
As a result, the two schools in Tunis are bursting at the seams as students keep coming, even in the middle of the school year.
“We’ve had to set up a home schooling program to meet the needs of the students in Tunis who will not fit into our schools there,” Abushala explained. [/restrict]
