In two village schools in the Municipality of Bitola, this school year classes will be held for one pupil each. One child, one school. These are the schools in Poeševo and Kremenica, and the parents explicitly asked for the children to stay there.

At the same time, three village schools - in Porodin, Kanino and Dihovo - are being put on hold. The municipality is careful with the wording: they are not closing, they are dormant. The distinction is legal and it matters to the parents, but for the village the meaning is the same. The desks stay empty.

The number the mayor did not comment on

At the press conference it was announced that Bitola has around 665 first-graders this year, a few more than last year. That sounds like good news until you look at the other figure from the same press conference: according to the Interior Ministry's lists, 853 pupils should have started first grade.

The gap is 188 children. The municipality's education department explains that enrolment is still open and that some families are abroad but may return. The wording is accurate. The question is why a municipality of this size has to wait until the end of September to find out how many children it has left.

Optimisation - the word of the year in education

The optimisation starts with the first and sixth grades and covers 13 classes across eight primary schools. The other grades stay as they were this year, with fewer than twenty pupils, which is below the legal minimum. Not a single teacher loses their job, and none has been reassigned as a teaching assistant.

The total number of pupils in the municipality's primary schools is 6,903. In secondary schools, 698 pupils enrolled in the first year - 11 fewer than last year. Five more village schools have no first-graders at all, but keep operating because they still have pupils in the higher grades and because the villages are still alive.

"Living villages" is the phrase the municipality uses. Where the line sits below which a village stops being alive - nobody has defined that. But when a school runs for one child, the line is no longer far off.