Shtip will take in 336 first-graders this year. Last year there were 27 more. That is almost an entire class that disappeared in a single year - and it is not a rounding error, it is a trend that has been running for years.

According to figures presented at a press conference by Snezhana Saneva, head of the Education and Public Services Sector in the Shtip municipality, 3,548 pupils will start classes in primary schools from grade one to nine on 1 September. In secondary education the figure is 2,021, of whom 508 are in the first year. In total 5,569 pupils will begin the new school year in the town.

For comparison, more than a decade ago Shtip had over 10,000 pupils across primary and secondary education combined. Today it is under 5,600. That is not a decline - that is a halving within the lifespan of a single generation.

The number behind the number

The reason is no mystery and it is not education policy. According to the State Statistical Office's publication on the regions, 936 children were born in the Eastern region in 2024, while 1,974 residents died. Natural growth is minus 1,038. When one year brings a thousand fewer people, fifteen years later you see it in the number of desks in first grade.

The municipality says the gap is smaller this year than in previous years - technically true, but it is the kind of comfort that amounts to "we are falling more slowly". Saneva pointed out that secondary education is shrinking too, but argued that is not an indicator since pupils can enrol in other towns.

No schools are closing in Shtip. But the nine-year school "Goce Delchev" is entering a process of optimisation - from this year it will not take in first-graders and over the next five years it will gradually shut down. Those first-graders will enrol elsewhere. The word is "optimisation", but what is happening is that a school is slowly ceasing to exist.

In neighbouring Delchevo four satellite schools are closing this year, and the optimisation process covers several classes across the region.

This is the part rarely said out loud when emigration comes up. It is not only the workforce leaving - the next generation, the one that will never even be born here, is leaving too. The school desk is the most precise demographic instrument we own, because it does not lie and it cannot be revised. The question for Shtip and for the whole east is not who will teach the lessons, but to whom.