The Ministry of Education is in a hurry to reduce classrooms, but for years it has been financing the inflated expenditures of the counties under it, and is not making efficiencies.
Expenditure on districts, such as property taxes, parking and office equipment, amounts to hundreds of millions of shekels a year.
Alongside the headquarters of the Ministry of Education, it also has a wide geographical spread: the ministry has no less than 8 districts, and each of them is responsible for different local authorities.
The authorities are: North, Haifa, Central, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, South and the District for Settlement and Haredi Education.
Each of the districts is headed by a district manager, with a deputy and a number of officials below him.
Each and every one of the districts sits in separate offices, and costs millions of shekels a year in electricity, water, property taxes, security, parking and more - before salaries.
Sometimes, different departments in a particular district sit in separate places, and the district rents offices for them for hundreds of thousands of shekels a year.
And how much does it cost us?
In the Jerusalem district, they spent NIS 2.6 million on parking in 2021, and in the Tel Aviv and Central districts, they paid "only" NIS 2.3 million for parking.
In the Southern District they paid over NIS 1.1 million in property taxes, while in the Haifa District they paid about half of the amount.
In the Tel Aviv district and the center, they paid almost NIS 2 million for electricity.
The list of expenses is getting longer.
Closed classroom, Photo: Lior Moldovan
Despite the geographical proximity between the districts, and although the mode of employment no longer necessarily requires a physical ministry at any point in the country, the Ministry of Education is not streamlining.
In addition, the data show that there is no proportion between the number of employees employed in each district and the number of students and institutions for which they are responsible.
The huge budget of the Ministry of Education (about NIS 70 billion) is mostly invested in education.
But at the same time, the Ministry of Education's engagement reports include thousands of items that reveal expenses that raise quite a few questions.
1,000 pistols
About 90% of the Ministry of Education's budget is earmarked for the salaries of teaching and education workers.
The rest, about NIS 7 billion, is earmarked for various issues such as transportation (NIS 2 billion a year), textbook approval committees, and external companies that deal with pedagogy.
It should be noted that the firm has been privatized in recent years and it pays millions to outside companies for pedagogical work.
The rest of the money is scattered among the various office units.
What do you buy in it?
Greeting cards, curtains, sending mail for millions of shekels (only sending payslips to office workers and teachers costs about 2.5 million shekels a year), office equipment, tables, chairs and furniture for the offices of education ministers and CEOs that change frequently, and quite a few disposable cups.
It turns out that the Ministry of Education also buys pistols for tens of thousands of shekels.
For example, in 2021 he spent about NIS 50,000 on Glock pistols.
The ministry explained that they have over a thousand guns in warehouses and they are distributed for security purposes.
One of the bodies that raises the most questions in the Ministry of Education is the National Authority for Measurement and Evaluation.
It is a body whose job is to measure student achievement, and it conducts quite a few studies, quite a few millions.
But in recent years the relevance of this body has diminished.
The research he conducts stretches over years, and it is impossible to understand from them what is effective and what is not.
In addition, the body performs a lot of research, but in practice the system can handle very few changes at a time, so the results of most of its research simply raise dust in the binder.
Were we wrong?
Fixed!
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