In a move designed to help end segregation in Tel Aviv public schools, the city's municipality has agreed to place 200 asylum seeker's children in schools beyond the south Tel Aviv area - an area stricken with poverty.
The preliminary hearing, spearhead by the University of Haifa's Clinic for Law and Educational Policy, led to an agreement that allows the children to study in the center and northern parts of Tel Aviv.
“While this is a step in the right direction, this is just the beginning of a very long legal battle,” said Dr. Tammy Harel Ben-Shahar, Academic Director of the Clinics for Law and Social Change, citing that this decision only concerns those specific children who petitioned the court, while thousands of others are still enrolled in segregated kindergartens and schools as a result of the municipality’s official policy.
The agreement includes first through third graders. The city's stance is that fourth and sixth-grade students should not be transferred but said it would be willing to entertain special requests for individuals with complicated cases.
The legal clinic is still anticipating whether the Ministry of Education will also support the transportation of students from the south of the city to their new school. They have said they are not prepared to pay for parents that choose to send their children to a school located far from their home but will make a final decision next month.
Haran Reichman and Tal Hassin of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the lawyers who filed the petition, said, “We will continue to fight until all the separate preschools and schools, which create different educational settings for white and black children, are shut down. Separate is and cannot be not equal.”