The diagnosis of the demographic situation in the newspaper Diena is expressed by the head of the Dobele County Education Department, Aija Ditrikhson.
“In general, there are 100 fewer children than last year,” she says about the trends in educational institutions. “What can never be predicted is the migration of residents,” notes the professional educator, “It only takes one large family to leave a small rural school for it to immediately impact the number of students—especially if it was already at the minimum threshold of acceptability.”
The average age of provincial teachers is already over 50. Many young teachers, as she put it, are “transients”—working for a year or two. It turns out that one school has 0.3 positions of a social educator—that is, one specialist works in three educational institutions. However, Ms. Ditrikhson is not tired of engaging in the crucial linguistic topic: “Each institution has already done what it could to offer another foreign language instead of Russian. In Penkule Primary School, Augstkalne Primary School, and the gymnasium, it is the French language.”
