About 500 students and parents from the Beit Yaakov Gilo girls’ school held a quiet protest on Tuesday morning in Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood against the city’s decision to keep the school divided between separate buildings. The families say the arrangement forces girls to travel between distant neighborhoods and buildings, hurting daily school life and the educational atmosphere.
For years, students were required to commute each day to Bayit VeGan. Although the school was promised a permanent building in Gilo, the younger grades were moved to a building in the neighborhood while the older grades remained in Bayit VeGan. Under the municipality’s plan for the coming school year, the upper grades are supposed to move to another building in Gilo, but it would still be separate from the younger students’ site.
The parents’ committee says the split is not just a logistical issue but a real harm to schooling, management and funding. “It is impossible to run an educational institution this way,” they warned, saying the arrangement “tears families apart” and amounts to “abandoning the girls.” They said there are already available nearby solutions that could unite the school immediately, but claimed a “politically unreasonable” blockage is preventing them from being adopted.
The parents said Tuesday’s protest is only the beginning and demanded that Jerusalem Municipality put the girls’ needs first and provide a permanent unified solution starting in the next school year. In response, the municipality said that for the first time all elementary-age girls living in Gilo will study within the neighborhood and will no longer need to leave it. It said grades 1 to 3 are already in Gilo, grades 4 to 8 currently study in Bayit VeGan, and all students will be in Gilo next year. The city added that it has invested millions of shekels in new infrastructure and buildings, and that a permanent school campus is now being built and is expected to be completed within about two years.
