There has long been a staff shortage at the school

A good school means, first of all, good teachers. Not the number of computer classes, interactive whiteboards or other equipment, but qualified teachers working according to their calling. Of course, the school needs computers, printers, and much more, but those who taught poorly with chalk and a rag will also teach poorly with an interactive whiteboard. And, on the contrary, only the talent of the teacher still maintains the mass school, the state of which in the provinces (and especially in the countryside) is close to ruin.

However, despite all the considerable investments in the modernization of general education, the scale of solving the key problem of teaching staff is microscopic. There has long been a staff shortage in schools.

In the areas of the Kirov region there are institutions where there are no 5-6 specialists in basic subjects. The authorities began to welcome the practice of hiring people who do not have a pedagogical education at all. The school administration determines that such and such a candidate can, in principle, be allowed to see children, sends him to three-week courses and, lo and behold, the former postman manages the teaching of physics, while simultaneously teaching the children a foreign language and fine arts.

In the absence of fish, of course, the cancer is a fish. The average age of a Russian teacher is well over fifty, the percentage of young teachers is low, and in rural areas it is extremely low. In general, the amount of support provided to graduates of pedagogical universities who are employed in their specialty is quite modest for all existing programs. For example, a young specialist in the Kirov region who gets a job in an educational institution located in a rural locality receives a one-time cash benefit in the amount of six salaries established for him. In 2012, the amount of this payment was 27 thousand rubles. Recently, a graduate with a high average score on his diploma can count on a payment of 100 thousand rubles under conditions of competition both in the city and in the countryside. However, even here the state is not able to do without shameful chicanery. There were cases when, under the formal pretext that it was not the first time that a young man was getting a job, “lifting money” was denied to those who worked part-time at school while being a student.

All these measures turn out to be half measures, completely insufficient to solve the problem. There are hundreds of vacancies in peripheral schools that cannot be filled due to the lack of housing for employees. A hundred thousand won't help if you don't have a roof over your head. For the time being, the rescue was carried out by veterans of teaching work - local residents, long-ago pensioners, whom the directors begged to work more and more. Now this resource has also been exhausted. The legislative norm in place since the early 1990s on the priority right of teachers to provide living space has, by and large, remained a fiction. For more than a decade, there has been empty talk about preferential conditions for purchasing housing. The declared program for the construction of office housing is of a ridiculous scope and is in fact not being implemented. Young teachers have nowhere to live, which means there is simply no one to work in schools.

In order to somehow influence the situation, the Government of the Russian Federation in 2011 issued a resolution on the procedure for providing subsidies to regional budgets to reimburse costs in connection with the provision of mortgage loans to young teachers.

Our regional authorities agreed to reimburse no more than a fifth of the mortgage - almost like in Tsarist Russia, when serfs, having accumulated a fifth of the ransom, could count on gaining personal freedom. Let me remind you that back then the ransom payments lasted for half a century, until the first revolution. Well, at least that's it. However, during 2012, the government of the Kirov region did not allocate a single ruble to repay mortgage loans to teachers (!). A mandatory condition for subsidizing is lending at 8.5% per annum, and there simply were no credit institutions in the region capable of this.

It is promised that this year some banks will respond to the stated conditions. And the years go by and, as you know, like birds, they fly. Those young people that the authorities once started talking about mortgages are already over forty, and they no longer have any hopes.

For suburban schools, the problem could be partially solved by introducing travel compensation. However, in the conditions of an all-out fight against corruption and extreme intimidation of officials, any financial question requiring independence runs into the following question: “Do you want me to be imprisoned?” Local leaders are afraid to take a step aside, because any undertaking without instructions and orders from above is perceived as a gross violation.

The shortage of personnel could be somewhat satisfied with attractive wages. This is not the first time that we have heard chatter about increasing teachers' salaries. The average in the Kirov region is supposedly already 18 thousand. I don’t know whether it is necessary for sane citizens to explain how this is possible if the teacher’s salary per head is a little more than 5 thousand rubles. The payment to the class teacher, the basis of educational work, reaches, I’m ashamed to say, one thousand rubles. In reality, a teacher receiving an average salary is a squeezed lemon; this is extreme intensification of work, which cannot last long. What kind of quality of teaching will we get as a result if the teacher doesn’t even have time to think about it?

During the reform of the education system, the moment of truth came. Or, from loud declarations, the authorities will move on to real solutions to problems, attracting worthy employees to educational institutions, and creating normal conditions for the life and work of teachers. Or again everything will slide down to a collection of random people, so that later the whole world can discuss how a teacher beat a student, or how a teacher’s student...