TEHRAN – Some 85 billion rials (nearly $2 million at the official rate of 42,000 rials) has been spent on average per day for renovating schools nationwide over the past three years, Education Minister Mohsen Haji Mirzaei has said.

Referring to the opening of educational, and welfare projects in 31 provinces and 338 cities, he announced that by the next seven months, 2,000 classrooms will be launched across the country.

President Hassan Rouhani officially inaugurated some 1,550 educational, training, and welfare projects across the country on Thursday via video conferencing.

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) has 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.

Some 500,000 students and 30,000 teachers will benefit from newly built educational spaces, he highlighted.

More than 15,000 educational, training, and sports spaces with 74,000 classrooms equivalent to 10 million square meters have been put into operation over the past eight years, he noted, adding, over the same period, 230,000 classrooms have been secured by replacing standard systems.

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