End to the struggle over the school building in Ramat Beit Shemesh: The Beit Shemesh Municipality, through attorney Uri Keidar, and the Ministry of Education signed a compromise agreement in the feuding classrooms at the Languages and Cultures school.
According to the agreement, which was submitted to the court, four mobile buildings will be placed in the school yard, to which 110 students from the Mishkenot Daat school who currently study in the empty wing of the building will move. The mobile homes will be placed with funding from the Ministry of Education, and until they are placed, the Haredi students will study in the school building, as the municipality originally demanded.
The agreement was signed despite the opposition of the Parents' Committee of Languages and Cultures.
At the same time, the municipality and the Ministry of Education will promote a comprehensive and long-term solution regarding the housing of all educational institutions in the city, as early as the 2016 school year, including the 'Mishkenot Daat' and 'Languages and Cultures' schools. Apparently, towards the next school year, the 'Languages and Cultures' school will move to one of the empty buildings in the 'old' Beit Shemesh, where most of the students live.
As you may recall, on the eve of the opening of the school year, the Beit Shemesh Municipality decided to allocate a wing on the grounds of the secular 'Languages and Cultures' school in Ramat Beit Shemesh A' for the benefit of the girls of the Haredi 'Mishkenot Daat' school, who were left without a place to study.
The decision sparked outrage from secular opposition members and parents of the Languages and Cultures School, who even held several violent demonstrations there.
The Ministry of Education also strongly opposed the entry of the Haredi students into the building, and filed a petition against the municipality in the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court, which rejected the petition for lack of authority.
The Ministry of Education filed another petition with the Jerusalem District Court, sitting as the Administrative Court, which determined that the hearing on the petition will take place next month, but until the hearing, the ultra-Orthodox girls cannot be removed from the secular school grounds.
Beit Shemesh Mayor Moshe Abutbul commented on the agreement and said: "I welcome and am happy about the cooperation of the Ministry of Education, which has proven that the welfare of the city's children from all sectors is above all considerations, and I hope that a fundamental and practical solution will indeed be found to resolve the developing shortage of educational buildings in Beit Shemesh.".
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