TEHRAN – The national budget bill for the next [Iranian calendar] year (March 2021-March 2022) has foreseen a 21-percent rise for the renovation and retrofit of schools.

A total of 450 billion rials (nearly $10.7 million the official rate of 42,000 rials) was proposed for school renovation in the budget bill; which is 21 percent higher than that of the previous year, Mehrollah Rakhshanimehr, director of the Organization for Development, Renovation, and Equipping Schools, said.

The government submitted the draft of the national budget bill for the next [Iranian calendar] year to Majlis on December 2.

The proposed budget amounted to about 24.357 quadrillion rials (about $580 billion), with a 20-percent rise from the current year’s budget.

Supplying basic goods, treatment, and medical equipment; securing livelihood; supporting production and employment; promoting and supporting non-oil exports and knowledge-based companies are the focal points of the bill.

107,000 schools need renovation nationwide

Rakhshanimehr 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.

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.

President Hassan Rouhani officially inaugurated some 1,550 educational, training, and welfare projects across the country in early-November via video conferencing.

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

The Organization for Development, Renovation, and Equipping 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).

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