{"id":17177,"date":"2025-11-28T09:27:41","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T07:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=17177"},"modified":"2026-10-24T15:02:56","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T13:02:56","slug":"zewail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/zewail\/","title":{"rendered":"Ahmed Zewail\u2019s School Annex: Parents Pay for Classrooms, Then Fight for Enrolment"},"content":{"rendered":"

For about four years, the family of <\/span>Sami Awad<\/b> has been living through great hardship, because their child, who is currently in the second grade of primary school, was placed in the First Tourist Village Official Language School, located in the 6th of October Educational Administration, 28 kilometres from where he lives with his family on Tersa Street in Haram, ever since he was in the first year of kindergarten, which has stood in the way of his attending school regularly and burdened his family financially because of transport costs.<\/span><\/p>\n

What the child and his family went through was not an exception: hundreds of affected parents living in the districts of Haram, Faisal, Dokki and Agouza in Giza Governorate, whose children are in kindergarten and the first and second grades of primary school, complain of their children being placed in distant educational administrations such as Atfih, El-Saff, October and Sheikh Zayed. However, the father and hundreds of other parents of pupils living within the jurisdiction of the Omraniya Educational Administration tried to find a way out of their crisis after failing to transfer their children through the online portal of the Ministry of Education.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sami confirms that he contributed together with the pupils’ parents, and that they paid a community contribution of EGP 45,000 for the second grade of primary school alone, to be added to the parents’ contributions, which reach about EGP 900,000, in order to equip the annex of the Ahmed Zewail School, which belongs to the Omraniya Educational Administration, so that it could accommodate their children instead of their having to endure the hardship and dangers of the journey to and from school and the cost of their transport. But after the renovation works were completed and the new school year began, they were shocked that their children’s legal status inside the Ahmed Zewail annex had not been regularised.<\/span><\/p>\n

He tells Zawia3: “The annex has not yet been approved by the Omraniya Educational Administration or the Ministry of Education and has not yet been handed over, nor have our children’s files been transferred to it, even though the pupils have been attending it regularly since the beginning of last October. But their attendance does not count legally, and therefore the attendance and absence register has not been approved, and the results of the assessments and the monthly exam have not been submitted to the educational administration.”<\/span><\/p>\n

He adds: “We and our children have been suffering for four years because our children have not been transferred to schools close to our residential block, and the ministry has not solved our problem. The last thing we were told is that the annex is not approved for placement, and that they will move our children to other schools as soon as new schools open to which the children can be transferred. We do not know exactly what our children’s fate is.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Sharing the same suffering is <\/span>Marina Francis<\/b>, the mother of a second-grade primary pupil from the October administration who lives with his family in the Haram district. Over the past years she was forced to take her young son to his distant school and to go back at midday to collect him, bearing great hardship, like other parents of affected pupils, as a result of their children being distributed across different educational administrations outside the Omraniya area, among them October, El-Saff, Atfih and Zayed. This forced them to rely on private buses to transport their children, at a cost of more than EGP 1,000 per child per month, which she considered a heavy financial burden on parents, stressing that the distance between their homes and their schools in October left the children exhausted and unable to follow their lessons regularly.<\/span><\/p>\n

She tells Zawia3: “The children used to leave their homes at six in the morning and return home after four in the afternoon, after a long and exhausting school day, and one of the school buses overturned on the road while carrying a number of pupils, which increased the parents’ anxiety and fear for their children.”<\/span><\/p>\n

The mother recounts that the parents submitted official requests and transfer papers to place their children in the annex of the Ahmed Zewail School in Omraniya, prepared the required lists and contributed to equipping the building as part of their efforts to resolve the crisis, but they have not received a clear response until now, more than a month after the start of the school year. She stresses that the children have already begun sitting school assessments, but they are counted among the \u201cabsent\u201d in their original administrations because their files have not been officially registered in the new building, noting that this situation is \u201cunacceptable both humanly and educationally\u201d, because the children bear no blame for the administrative problem.<\/span><\/p>\n

Marina appealed to the Ministry of Education and the competent authorities to intervene urgently to regularise the students’ legal status inside the Ahmed Zewail annex, in order to protect their academic future, saying: “Parents ask for nothing but their children’s right to education close to their homes, in a safe and stable environment, after all the effort and money they have spent\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

The situation was not much different for <\/span>Mohamed Samir<\/b>, whose daughter was placed in one of the schools of the Atfih Educational Administration, 105.8 km from her home in the Omraniya district of Haram, a journey that takes more than an hour and a half by car. For more than a year, the father of the girl, who is currently in the first grade of primary school, had been trying to transfer her to a school close to home, submitting several requests to the Omraniya administration and the Giza Education Directorate, but his efforts came to nothing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like other parents who tried to find a way out of their children’s suffering, they turned to MP Ehab Mansour, who intervened and met the director of the Omraniya Educational Administration, Soad Mohamed, and a number of officials in the administration. They agreed at the time to use an abandoned building belonging to the \u201cAl-Siddiq\u201d school, behind the Ahmed Zewail Language School, as a new teaching site, on condition that the parents equip the building entirely at their own expense as a form of community participation, after she visited the school accompanied by the MP, as Mohamed Samir confirms to Zawia3.<\/span><\/p>\n

The father recounts that the parents collected an amount of EGP 1000 from each family, and the number of participants exceeded about 1000 of those affected. The building was equipped in every respect, including the iron fences, wooden doors, plumbing, electricity, paintwork and fans for the classrooms, until the building was ready for use. It was then officially handed over to the administration’s director, Soad Mohamed, and a committee of officials, so that teaching could start, as he put it.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the start of the new 2025 – 2026 school year, the parents were shocked when the educational administration refused to admit the pupils to the Ahmed Zewail School annex after its renovation, and then asked them to obtain four transfer forms from the original administrations in which the children are enrolled. The parents did obtain them, paid the fees and received the textbooks, but they were surprised once again when the administration refused to sign or stamp the transfer papers and confiscated them on the pretext of \u201creviewing them\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

He says: “Since the beginning of last October our children have been studying in a building annexed to the Ahmed Zewail School without any legal proof, while the students are still enrolled in their original administrations, such as Atfih, El-Saff and October. The administration told us that our children are only guests, and that their files will not be officially transferred to the school.”<\/span><\/p>\n

The father believes that some educational administrations affiliated with the Ministry of Education still think that the building has not yet undergone renovation and that no teaching takes place in it, while the truth is that the pupils attend the Ahmed Zewail School annex daily and sit full exams and assessments, but attendance and absence records and assessment results are not sent to the educational administrations because the building is not officially recognised.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mohamed stresses that the parents fear their children will lose the school year because of this unresolved situation, explaining that they submitted a collective complaint to the Cabinet, numbered 10889325, but have not yet received a response from the relevant authorities. He calls on the competent authorities to intervene urgently to hold to account those he described as “responsible for this negligence”, to register the building officially among the schools of the Omraniya Educational Administration, and to establish the students’ enrolment legally.<\/span><\/p>\n

Zawia3 obtained copies of invoices for the contributions of the pupils’ parents to the maintenance and renovation works carried out on the Ahmed Zewail School annex building, which belongs to the Omraniya Educational Administration. It also obtained photographs documenting those works, as well as the visit made months ago to the building site by Soad Mohamed, director of the Omraniya Educational Administration, accompanied by MP Ehab Mansour, member of the House of Representatives and deputy chair of the Manpower Committee, before the renovation works began.<\/p>\n

Zawia3 contacted Soad Mohamed, director of the Omraniya Educational Administration, by phone and asked her about the problem facing the parents of pupils at the Ahmed Zewail School annex, in her capacity as the official responsible for the educational administration to which the school belongs, but she abruptly ended the call, refusing to answer our questions about the complaints of the affected pupils’ families, and also blocked us from calling her.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

MP Ehab Mansour, member of the House of Representatives, deputy chair of the Manpower Committee and head of the parliamentary bloc of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, had published a <\/span>post <\/span><\/a>on his official Facebook page on 27 September last, in which he announced that he had held a meeting with Soad Mohamed, director of the educational administration in Omraniya, to discuss a number of issues related to the education sector in the area.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mansour explained in his post at the time that, as regards the Ahmed Zewail School annex, the equipping of the building had been fully completed, noting that placement was under way in batches starting from the current week, and stressing that the step came as part of parliamentary follow-up on the education file and of serving the families and students in the Omraniya constituency.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When we put the question to the MP, he confirms to Zawia3 that he has not yet received any official information about the latest developments in the problem of the Ahmed Zewail School annex in the Omraniya district of Giza Governorate, which concern parents’ complaints that their children’s registration at the school has not been legally approved, explaining that his earlier intervention in this file aimed to provide a suitable alternative site to accommodate the pupils, who had been directed under the placement process to schools far from their residential areas.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mansour stresses that efforts at that time were focused on solving the problem of overcrowding and distance, and that he was not aware of any new problems concerning legal procedures or the approval of students’ files, pledging to inquire into the details of the crisis through the relevant bodies in the Giza Education Directorate to learn the details of the current situation and establish why the pupils’ official enrolment procedures have not been completed even though teaching is actually proceeding regularly inside the building, and to follow up on the matter until a solution is reached that guarantees the rights of the children and parents.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Recommended reading: <\/b>\u201cEnough Absurdity\u201d: Parents Lead Calls for a Strike in Protest at Education Policies in Egypt<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n


\nThe education authorities’ account contradicts parents’ testimonies<\/b><\/h1>\n

In an attempt to establish the causes of the crisis, Zawia3 put the question to <\/span>Saeed Attia<\/b>, director of the Giza Education Directorate, who states in a phone call that the disputed building is an “annexed facility” set up temporarily to spare students the hardship of travelling long distances to their original schools, until a new school is received and assigned an official numerical identity by the ministry, after which the students will be transferred to it legally.<\/span><\/p>\n

Contrary to the parents’ account and the photographs and documents we obtained, Saeed Attia, director of the Giza Education Directorate, denies that there is any truth to the claim that parents of students at the Ahmed Zewail School or its annex contributed to equipping the building through community contributions, saying: “This is untrue, and the school administration did not receive any sums of money from the parents, and has nothing to do with what is being circulated about its being equipped at the expense of the local community”.<\/span><\/p>\n

He tells Zawia3: “The educational process is proceeding regularly inside the annex, where students’ attendance and absence are recorded, and their assessments and periodic results are sent to the main school to which they belong, and attendance for the school year is officially counted for all enrolled students.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the directorate’s plan to tackle student density and the shortage of classrooms, Saeed Attia explains that a new school with 80 classrooms is currently being handed over, and is expected to help resolve the crisis within the jurisdiction of the Omraniya Educational Administration, noting that Giza has a number of new educational projects under way to ease the pressure on existing schools.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The director of the Giza Education Directorate had <\/span>stated<\/span><\/a> to Zawia3 earlier that priority in fee-paying education (experimental schools) is determined by age: pupils joining kindergarten who are 6 years old less one day are placed first in experimental schools within their residential block, followed progressively by younger children, so that priority goes to the older age.<\/span><\/p>\n

He explained that the directorate placed 10,000 pupils in 85 schools in Giza according to the residential block to which they belong, while 8,000 pupils were left without places in schools last year because there were no vacant seats in the schools around them. When parents demanded that the pupils be enrolled in schools in any educational administration so that they would not lose the school year, the directorate was forced to place 8,000 kindergarten pupils in schools with vacant seats, in administrations such as El-Saff and Atfih, so as not to have to increase class density in the experimental schools located in the residential blocks to which the pupils belong, which would harm the educational process and affect the pupils’ learning.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

A large number of parents in Giza Governorate suffer from the distribution<\/a> of their children applying for kindergarten or the early grades to schools located in educational administrations very far from their homes, reaching about 100 kilometres or more. Last May, the Giza Education Directorate issued official instructions to the directors of educational administrations on accommodating the remaining kindergarten children up to the age of five, as part of the directorate’s plan to accommodate all applicants for the first stage of pre-primary education for the new school year.<\/p>\n

The letter issued by the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education in Giza and addressed to the directors of educational administrations explained that the decision was based on statistics from the educational administrations that recorded the existence of children who have not yet been placed within the official admissions.<\/p>\n

The decision included placing pupils from the Abu El-Nomros, El-Badrashein and El-Hawamdiya administrations in the Salah Salem Basic Education School and the Martyr Mohamed Abdel Hafiz Primary School, both belonging to the El-Ayyat administration; placing pupils from the Omraniya administration in the Abu Bakr El-Siddiq Primary School and the Amr Ibn El-Aas School, both belonging to the El-Saff administration; placing pupils from the Haram administration in the Atfih Joint Primary School belonging to the Atfih administration; placing pupils from the Dokki administration in the Kafr Ammar Primary School belonging to the El-Ayyat administration; placing pupils from the Agouza administration in the Salah Salem Basic Education School belonging to the El-Ayyat administration; and placing pupils from the North Giza administration in the annexed Martyr Mohamed Abdel Hafiz Primary School belonging to the El-Ayyat administration.<\/p>\n

At the end of its instructions, the directorate stressed that these measures come as part of reducing densities and guaranteeing access to education for all children, with the educational administrations following up on the implementation of the placement decisions and taking into account the regularity of the educational process inside the annexed schools.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Recommended reading: <\/b>School Placement Sends Children in Giza 100 km Away from Their Schools<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/b>Student density<\/strong><\/h1>\n

For his part, Major General Engineer <\/span>Yousry El-Deeb<\/b>, head of the General Authority for Educational Buildings, stresses that the authority is currently carrying out an expanded plan to end the problems of student density and school shifts in primary schools, in implementation of the directives of the Minister of Education, Mohamed Abdel Latif, stressing that the target is that no primary school will have evening shifts or student overcrowding from the next school year onwards.<\/span><\/p>\n

He tells Zawia3: “A number of new government and experimental schools entered service during the current year, while work is currently under way to complete the tendering and construction of other schools that will enter service in the coming months”.<\/span><\/p>\n

Regarding the Ahmed Zewail School annex crisis, El-Deeb stresses that the Educational Buildings Authority is not responsible for operating schools or managing their annexes, as this falls within the remit of the education directorates, explaining that the authority’s role is limited to construction, expansions and equipment, while the directorates determine operating mechanisms and the distribution of students.<\/span><\/p>\n

The head of the authority believes that converting a building within a government school into an annex belonging to an experimental school is not possible administratively and organisationally, since a government (Arabic) school remains governmental and an official language school remains experimental, adding: “It is not permissible to carve out part of a government building and convert it into an experimental one, because that causes structural and administrative problems”.<\/span><\/p>\n

El-Deeb notes that the distribution of students to schools is subject to specific criteria, among them that the distance between a child’s home and school should range from 500 to 800 metres at most, stressing that exceeding these criteria is not within the authority’s remit but among the tasks of the educational administrations that supervise operation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The head of the General Authority for Educational Buildings concludes his statements to us by stressing that the Ministry of Education is seeking to provide new schools in areas deprived of educational services, so as to ensure that every child obtains their right to education close to their home, adding that next year will see “a tangible improvement in the distribution of students and a reduction of densities inside classrooms”.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the Egypt Projects Map website, Giza Governorate saw the opening<\/a> of 8 new schools at the start of the 2019\/2020 school year, at a total cost of EGP 48,880,000, as part of the state’s plan to reduce student overcrowding. Ahead of the 2023 \u2013 2024 school year, 11 new schools were built<\/a> at a cost of EGP 222,600,000, with a total of 367 classrooms, and 9 schools saw expansions and additional storeys at a cost of EGP 65 million, with a total of 207 classrooms.<\/p>\n

Ahead of the start of the 2025 – 2026 school year, 14 schools comprising 539 classrooms were opened<\/a> in Cairo Governorate, in addition to 43 new schools in Alexandria Governorate, alongside the opening<\/a> by the Minister of Education, Mohamed Abdel Latif, of three schools in a number of educational administrations in Giza Governorate, to reduce student density in classrooms. Engineer Adel El-Naggar, Governor of Giza, also announced<\/a> last September that 22 new schools had entered service, providing 619 new classrooms in the governorate, to improve the quality of educational services provided to students, while Saeed Attia, undersecretary of the Giza Education Directorate, stated<\/a> that 35 new schools in Giza had entered service for the first time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Recommended reading: <\/b>Burdens First, Education Later: A New School Year of Shocking Decisions for Parents in \u201cExperimental and International\u201d Schools<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/b><\/p>\n

Absence of coordination<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Commenting on the crisis of the parents of pupils at the Ahmed Zewail School annex in Omraniya, <\/span>Dr Kamal Mogheeth<\/b>, an education expert and member of the National Centre for Educational Research, believes that the crisis reflects a clear flaw in the system of education management, both in terms of the shortage of schools and classrooms and the absence of legal regulation of community contributions, which have turned into a heavy financial burden on Egyptian families.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mogheeth believes that what happened in the case of this school is a direct result of the absence of official coordination between the parents and the ministry, noting that it is not legally permissible to establish any educational annex or receive students without written and stamped approval from the Ministry of Education. He tells Zawia3: “The parents, despite their good intentions, fell victim to poor organisation, and their action in equipping the school without an official document makes it, legally speaking, more like a private tutoring centre than a recognised educational institution”.<\/span><\/p>\n

The education expert stresses that the bigger problem lies in the state’s failure to spend on education, noting that the government is gradually moving towards making citizens bear the cost of the educational process instead of bearing it in full itself, as President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi expressed in earlier statements about the end of free education, adding that \u201cthe state does not want to bear the burden of educating all citizens, so it left the door open to private education and private universities\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mogheeth explains that this decline in funding has led to a shortage of educational staff, the deterioration of infrastructure, and the spread of compulsory payment of financial contributions inside government and experimental schools, where some principals and teachers are forced to ask parents for sums ranging between EGP 200 and EGP 500 to cover the costs of cleaning, maintenance or workers’ wages.<\/span><\/p>\n

He notes that solving the education crisis is not limited to building new schools, because the educational process is an \u201cintegrated system\u201d resting on several elements, including: the qualified teacher, modern curricula, a safe learning environment, fair exams and diverse activities, considering that \u201ceducation is a heavy industry that needs comprehensive and simultaneous reform in all its components, not partial or temporary solutions\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

The education expert concludes, saying: \u201cThe education crisis cannot be treated by building schools alone; that is like treating a patient by moving him to a clean room without giving him the medicine. The radical solution to Egypt’s education crises begins with increasing education allocations in the general budget, allowing the state to invest genuinely in developing infrastructure, appointing teachers and improving the quality of the educational process”.<\/span><\/p>\n

The crisis of the parents of pupils at <\/span>the Ahmed Zewail School annex in Omraniya<\/b> remains a stark example of the complexities of the education system in Egypt, and of what citizens suffer from the lack of coordination between executive bodies, slow administrative procedures and weak planning in distributing students to schools. While officials insist that teaching is proceeding regularly and lawfully, hundreds of families live in a state of anxiety and anticipation, fearing that their children, whose enrolment is not officially recognised despite their daily attendance in class, will lose the school year.<\/span><\/p>\n

At its core, the crisis reveals a growing gap between official discourse and the reality on the ground, and an unregulated reliance on community contributions to cover the state’s shortfall in funding educational infrastructure. Between promises of imminent solutions and future plans to reduce densities, the children remain the weakest party in an equation that has not yet done them justice, while parents await a decisive intervention that ends their suffering and restores to their children their right to a safe, nearby and stable education.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ministry of Education refuses to officially approve the school, leaving hundreds of children caught between actual attendance and non-existent enrolment, amid contradictory official accounts and an absence of solutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":14679,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[413],"tags":[],"kateb":[1550],"class_list":["post-17177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-en","kateb-aya-yasser"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/\u0645\u062f\u0631\u0633\u0629-\u0632\u0648\u064a\u0644-scaled.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17177"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24044,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177\/revisions\/24044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17177"},{"taxonomy":"kateb","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kateb?post=17177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}