Union Activists: Demanding Teachers Are Being Dismissed; Minister of Education: No Janitors Have Been Hired for 20 Years

As a significant number of the country's educational staff have been dismissed or suspended for political or ideological reasons, the Minister of Education has claimed that due to budgetary issues, "no janitors (school fathers) have been hired by this ministry for over 20 years." According to the state news agency ISNA, Reza Morad Sahraei, the Minister of Education in Ebrahim Raisi's government, stated that he is the "most ashamed" minister in the cabinet, constantly lamenting financial matters. He reported a lack of "good nutrition" for some students in boarding high schools, saying that due to budget shortages, "students from several villages want to come to the city for education, and I say we only have the capacity for 200 students, and 3 girls must drop out of school." Education has undergone many changes in recent decades, especially after the 1979 revolution, including the dismissal of many previous educational staff (through ideological and political purges) along with changes in curricula and the content of many educational resources for children, adolescents, and youth in Iran. Following the implementation of ideological and governmental policies in the education system, some educational staff have been forced to resign, and many have been dismissed against their will. In this context, the website "Didban Iran" reported on November 7 that Jalal Mahmoudzadeh, a member of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, stated that "since the Minister of Education took office, 15,000 to 20,000 school administrators have been dismissed for political and ideological reasons." Furthermore, teachers and education staff have expressed their protests over poor salaries, payment discrepancies, and the non-implementation of the "job classification plan" through sit-ins, strikes, or street gatherings over the years. Meanwhile, the "One Hundred Thousand Signatures" campaign wrote at the beginning of October that some "responsible and caring" teachers have been imprisoned, dismissed, forced into retirement, exiled, or faced other entirely unjust punishments for their demands or critiques. The "Coordinating Council of Cultural Associations of Iran" previously described the issuance of "retaliatory" rulings against union activists and teachers as causing "students to be deprived of education and stripping them of their material and cultural livelihoods." In this regard, the "Islamic Association of Teachers of Iran, the Teachers' Organization of Iran, and the Cultural Association of Islamic Iran" issued a statement deeming the judicial and security actions against active union and political teachers, the issuance of long prison sentences, and the creation of cases against them in Islamic Revolutionary Courts, as well as the issuance of dismissal, forced retirement, exile, and in some cases, the cutting of salaries and removal from ranking eligibility, as one of the crises in the educational system of the Islamic Republic. Changes to the content of first-grade textbooks will take place in October 2024. The Ahvaz Court of Appeals issued a ruling to discontinue the prosecution of Pyruz Nami, a teacher union activist. Two months after the start of the school year, "schools without teachers" were confirmed despite the minister's denial. 1.5 million children are on the verge of dropping out of school; 14 million children lack proper nutrition. Hiring 20,000 janitors for schools; changing the status of service-purchased teachers; perhaps another time. An education official stated, "We have been instructed" to pay attention to "gender identity" in curricula.