Joint junior-senior schools in Fukushima

Joint junior-senior high schools planned in nuclear crisis zone to attract kids

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20130605p2a00m0na019000c.html

FUKUSHIMA -- An "education recovery" committee from Fukushima Prefecture's Futaba District, host to the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, unanimously agreed on May 4 to create a joint junior-senior high school for students from the area.

Reconstituting district schools as they were before the nuclear crisis evacuation appears extremely difficult, as local area students have now been living scattered across Fukushima Prefecture and Japan for more than two years.

In response, in December last year the committee -- made up of the municipal board of education chiefs for the eight towns and villages in Futaba District, representatives from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and the prefectural board of education -- began to consider consolidating schools. The committee's efforts are also driven by the knowledge that, if the students don't return, the district's municipalities could eventually cease to exist.

The towns and villages have reopened primary and junior high schools in areas outside the district, often in communities where their residents are now living. They have also opened five prefectural high schools, including branch schools, to service their evacuees. However, as of April this year total enrollment stood at 1,142 students, down from the 7,943 children registered at district schools before the March 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster.

The committee agreed unanimously that "it would be hard for individual municipalities to rebuild their education systems on their own," and settled on the combined junior-senior high school as a way to make returning to the district more attractive to students.

The committee, which met behind closed doors, also plans to create a "hometown" subject to help educate a future workforce for the area.

Details of the plan, including where the school will be built and who will run it, however, remained unresolved and will be addressed concretely at the committee's next meeting later in June. The members also failed to set out a specific vision for reorganizing high schools.

A proposal to build the new school in the neighboring city of Iwaki -- where many of the district's nuclear crisis refugees are currently living -- was tabled but also not passed after some municipalities where children are already back in class complained the move would impact their schools.

Meanwhile, nuclear crisis refugees themselves have expressed doubts about the establishment of a new junior-senior high school, with some residents saying their children "are already used to the local school" where they've evacuated, and that "even if there were a combined junior-senior high school, it could be impossible to get to them" if they're far away.