TEHRAN – President Hassan Rouhani will officially inaugurate some 1,550 educational, training, and welfare projects across the country on Thursday via video conferencing, ISNA reported on Wednesday.

The projects include 1,422 educational places with 8,051 classrooms, 124 training centers, and 4 welfare centers, measuring a total of 1.1 million square meters.

A sum of 360 trillion rials (nearly $8.5 billion at the official rate of 42,000 rials) have been spent in this regard, the report added, highlighting that about 70 percent of the funds have been provided by the school renovation organization and the rest by school-building benefactors.

Mehrollah Rakhshanimehr, director of the Organization for Development, Renovation and Equipping, said in August that some 30 percent of the country’s schools have been constructed by school-building benefactors; there are 450 school-building charities in Iran.

In line with the education reform plan, people who have a popular reputation are being invited as ambassadors to attract public participation for school construction even by buying a brick.

Iran has many school-building benefactors amounting to 650,000 people inside and 1,000 people outside the country.

There are some 107,000 schools nationwide with 530,000 classes, 160,000 of which are dilapidated, not meeting safety standards. Some 30 percent of the schools nationwide are old, of which some 12 percent must be completely rebuilt and 18 percent must be retrofitted.

The organization for renovation, development, and equipment of schools started operating in the Iranian calendar year 1396 (March 2017- March 2018), which received a budget of 8.5 trillion rials (about $200 million).

FB/MG