Chento Sends Its Barracks Into History: A New School With 30 Classrooms for 170 Million Denars

The new building of the Krste Petkov Misirkov primary school in Skopje's Chento neighbourhood, in the Gazi Baba municipality, has been put into use. The two-storey building has 30 classrooms and specialist rooms across 3,128 square metres, is adapted for pupils with disabilities, and the investment amounts to 170 million denars. According to Mayor Boban Stefkovski, it has capacity for 713 pupils.

The new school replaces facilities where lessons had been held in barracks for decades. "Until a few years ago there were only barracks here, left over practically from the time of the earthquake, 50 years and more, the children studied in what I would call substandard conditions," Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski said at the opening. Education Minister Vesna Janevska said: "The moment has come for the barracks to be left behind us, in history."

Half a century of barracks in the capital is a fact that shouldn't get lost in the applause. The temporary buildings in Chento lasted longer than the working lives of most of the teachers who taught in them. The new building is welcome, but it is also a reminder of how long one government after another treated this as normal.

Mickoski also used the opening for a broader message: the Government, he says, is working on more than 1,200 projects together with the municipalities, funded through transfers from the central budget. Janevska said that 90 projects worth 70 million euros are being carried out over two years, half through the Ministry of Education and Science and half through the government's call for municipal capital projects.

The school, however, isn't quite finished. The PM himself listed what's left: "in spring for it to turn green, the fence to be replaced, maybe the car park for the staff." The opening comes in a school year that started with around 238,000 pupils, with 433 fewer classes, while several rural schools are slated for closure because there aren't enough pupils. Chento got modern classrooms. Does the state have a plan for the places where soon there will be no one left to sit in them?