Sadr City Schools Overwhelmed

Sadr City’s schools are teeming with students who cram into classrooms so overcrowded that children are forced to sit on the floor and attend school in shifts.



Education officials, political leaders and educators paint a picture of schools bursting at the seams in Sadr City, a Shia slum in the capital that has been neglected for decades.



The United Nations estimates that Baghdad’s most impoverished and densely-populated district is home to 1.3 million of the capital’s seven million residents, most of whom are believed to be children. Many here live in squalor, with only a few hours of electricity and water per day and overcrowded housing – problems compounded by the district’s growing population.



For many children, the conditions at school are not substantially different from those at home. Education experts say schools are overwhelmed by students and have poor services and limited resources – shortfalls that are affecting learning.



“The situation is unbearable,” said Raad al-Musawi, principal of Al-Basheer elementary school.



Many of the problems in Sadr City schools are faced by those throughout Iraq, which have struggled with large class sizes, ageing facilities and overcrowding since the 1990s when the country was under international sanctions.



But education is especially critical for children in Sadr City because of the area’s high unemployment, poverty and illiteracy rates, educators argue. According to a UN report in March, 45 per cent of women and 37 per cent of men in Sadr City had not completed primary school.



Teachers and heads of schools said students in the area often show up to class hungry and struggle to finish the school day.



Yasin Waheeb, an education planning director in Baghdad, said classes should have a maximum of 25 students but many in Sadr City are accommodating 40 to 50. Students frequently sit on the floor because of the lack of desks.



Education administrators are trying to accommodate the large number of students by limiting school hours and holding five classes instead of seven.



Many schools work in shifts, with sets of students attending class for only three hours daily, the length of the classes reduced from 45 to 30 minutes.



School planners and engineers say some of the schools are decades old, have rarely been repaired – if ever – and are accommodating twice as many students as they did when they were built.



“Sadr City is considered to be the worst area in Baghdad in terms of the [number] of schools,” said Amjad al-Shimari, head of a teachers’ non-governmental organisation in Baghdad.



“The problem that faces us today is [Sadr] City itself. If we wanted to build more schools, we would need more space. This is impossible, as most of the areas in the city are built up.”



An estimated 25 schools have to share their facilities in the district to accommodate the growing number of students, according to local education officials. Many schools in Sadr City have more than 2,000 students.



According to a 2007 report by the Baghdad provincial council, the average student population in Baghdad schools was 550 students.



Developed in the late 1950s, Sadr City today is the stronghold of the firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi army militia fought fierce battles with Iraqi and US forces in 2008. Twenty-two schools were damaged during the fighting, according to a UN report.



The Iraqi government and US military have repaired and re-opened some schools, but the sector was under pressure long before the fighting, according to education officials.



Ammar Zamil, who heads the ministry of education’s facilities department, blamed Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime for neglecting Sadr City because it is a Shia area. Like many buildings in Sadr City, schools lack electricity, water and sewage systems.



“The deterioration of these buildings started when the former regime neglected to repair them,” he said.



The buildings today “are not fit for the increase in the number of [students]”, he said, “[they] require large and modern buildings – not ones that date back to the 1950s.”



Sadr City mayor Hasan Karim Mattar said local authorities are concerned that education will not be made the priority.



“School buildings are the most important issue, but this won’t be resolved in the near future,” he said. “The government needs to make an effort. The ministry [of education] should recognise some of these issues and provide solutions.”



Uday Kareem Al-Mayahi is an IWPR trainee in Baghdad.