The All Citizens Party congratulates students, teachers, educators and parents on the new school year.

The new school year begins today, Monday, for more than 2.5 million students after the end of the summer break. Among them are about half a million students from Arab society.

These students are returning to school in the shadow of ongoing wars whose end, goals, or cost no one knows. In addition, they are returning to school under a Minister of Education who is considered the worst since the establishment of the state, as he tries to change everything that is democratic, fair, and professional in the curricula and management and appointment methods. His policies and conduct led to the largest wave of resignations of senior officials in the ministry, and the early retirement of many of them. His unprofessional policies have caused an acute shortage of teachers due to the small number of new teachers applying for teaching jobs. His policies have also caused unemployment among teachers in Arab society – despite the shortage of teachers in Jewish schools!

The "All Its Citizens" party strongly condemns Minister Kish's unprofessional interventions in the curriculum and exam materials, and condemns his orders to delete chapters on liberal democracy from the citizenship matriculation exam. The Ministry of Education also deleted the topic of the Constitution from the focus, in which students are supposed to learn about the importance of a constitution as a means of protecting human rights and limiting the power of the government. In addition, the ministry also removed from the focus the discussion of the legal status of the Declaration of Independence. It seems that the minister wants to contribute his part to the government's policy of harming democracy in the country and to carry out a legal and political revolution - at the expense of educating students in democratic and liberal values, in favor of religious-Messianic education, whose budgets are being increased by millions in various ways.

The party demands that the Ministry of Education take action to stop the policy of discrimination against schools in Arab society, which suffer from lower budgets, overcrowding in classrooms, and a lack of new school construction to alleviate overcrowding, as well as the lack of renovation of old schools, some of which are on the verge of collapse, and the lack of construction of adequate standard shelters in most Arab schools. The party also demands that the minister provide schools for thousands of students from the unrecognized villages in the Negev, who are forced to walk several kilometers a day to reach distant schools in difficult conditions – sometimes in rain, floods, or extreme heat – or at least provide them with appropriate transportation, since they have no official local authorities to care for them, and there is no solution in sight to their problem.

The party congratulates students, teachers, educators, and parents on a new school year, and wishes everyone a successful school year and better learning conditions.

The party of all its citizens

1/9/2025