Teachers in Dilapidated School in Armenian Village Refuse to Give Up On Republican Party

Much has been written in a number of newspapers about the school after Tigran Mets in the village of Ptghunk in Armenia’s Armavir province: the building is in a state of ruin, most of the students have given up and moved to schools in nearby villages, while the remaining 116 are all from poor and low-income families. The authorities have been promising and failing for years to either repair the building or build a new one. The school headmaster is unable to explain the reason why the authorities keep neglecting the issue.

On September 25, a group of journalists from Yerevan visited the school and heard the teachers’ complaints: the school has no water in winter as the sole fountain freezes from the cold; the classrooms are not heated properly as the 2 liters of oil allocated for each room per day are expended before the end of classes; conducting classes in the gym is too dangerous, so the kids only play chess and checkers; water dripping from the ceiling has spoiled all the walls and the patriotic posters they are covered with. Despite this, the teachers say, the kids are excellent students who win in olympiads and “serve on the front-line after graduating.”

“The kindergarten in our village has an American sponsor; it is perfectly renovated. The first day of school each year is a chaos: first-graders don’t want to enter the building and beg their parents to take them back to kindergarten. We somehow convince them to go inside, and after that they never want to leave because we have an excellent pedagogical staff,” headmaster Silva Mkrtumyan says.

The authorities have been promising to renovate the building for over 15 years. Much to the visiting journalists’ surprise, the teachers continue to have faith in the ruling Republican Party and have yet to renounce their allegiance to the party. “Only the Republican Party worries about our school,” one of the teachers insists.

The teachers are also happy with their elected Republican MP Seyran Saroyan who, according to them, has recently personally appealed to president Serzh Sargsyan with a request to repair the school. “He told Sargsyan that he wanted nothing for himself, if only he would ensure that the school in Ptghunk is repaired,” another teacher points out.

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