Northern Israel’s children need protected classrooms, not more promises - opinion

Some 250 kindergartens across the North opened the school year without full protection. The need has been recognized, the plans approved, the budgets promised. What is missing now is a single address that can move quickly from decision to execution on the ground.

On September 1, as the school year began, a mother from Kfar Vradim, about 15 km. east of Nahariya,  said that all she wants for her children is one uninterrupted year of school. Not exceptional achievements, not ambitious programs. Just one year in the same classroom, with the same friends and teachers, without sirens, without evacuations, and without moving from one temporary arrangement to the next.

After what the children of the North have lived through, that is not a wish anyone can take for granted. The continuity they need begins with one basic condition: the ability to learn in safety. Yet according to a report by KAN News, Israel’s public broadcaster, roughly 250 kindergartens in the North, from communities along the Lebanese border down to the Krayot just outside Haifa, opened this year without full protection. That means no standard safe room inside the building, or within a few seconds’ walk of it, as the region’s short warning time requires.

Many children in the area have already been through long months of remote learning, classes in temporary structures, and separation from their communities. Even now that they are home, the return to normal life cannot be complete as long as parents do not know whether, when the siren sounds, their children have a protected space they can reach in time.

Amit Sofer, head of the Merom Hagalil Regional Council, has warned about the same gap. More than six months ago, he says, the Defense Ministry informed the council that its protection requests had been approved. The promised funding has still not been transferred, and the school year is already underway.

Approving those requests matters. It shows that the need is recognized and that there is a willingness to meet it. And protective construction is not the work of a single day: it requires engineering plans, budget authorization, and tenders. That is precisely why it has to begin months before the school year opens, rather than be measured against it. In border communities, protecting a school is not one more infrastructure project. It is what allows a family to stay.

This reality calls for a different way of working. Israel’s government machinery was built mostly for ordinary times, when budgets pass between ministries, authorizations are signed, and plans advance one stage at a time. Rebuilding a border region after a war requires faster and more creative channels, ones that connect decisions to what actually happens on the ground.

After October 7, the Tekuma Directorate was established to concentrate authority, funding, and execution capacity for the damaged communities of the western Negev, along the Gaza border. In the North, the Tenufa Directorate now operates, having been folded into Tekuma and upgraded from a coordinating staff body into a directorate with its own positions and a multi-year budget.

Time between approval, execution

The gap, then, is not the absence of a coordinating body. It is the absence of the authority to shorten the distance between approval and execution. Protecting a single kindergarten is specified by the Home Front Command, budgeted by the Finance Ministry, carried out through the Defense Ministry, and dependent on the local council. Not one of them answers for the result. An urgent national mission needs a single address, clear authority, available funding, and short timelines.

For the mother in Kfar Vradim, the picture is far simpler: either there is a protected space in her children’s kindergarten or there isn’t. A dedicated track of this kind would allow government ministries, local authorities, and contractors to work together. It is needed for protecting schools, and after that for the rest of the tasks that will determine whether the North merely resumes functioning or genuinely recovers.

The Galilee sends a respectable delegation to the Knesset, across several parties. This is not a political or partisan issue. The safety of children on the border and the continuity of their education are a shared national responsibility. The students are already in their classrooms, the need has already been approved, and the people on the ground are ready to act. What they need now is a track that lets them carry it out.

Because for a mother in Kfar Vradim, one uninterrupted year of school is a wish. For the State of Israel, making it real should be a mission.

The writer is the president and founder of the Kedma pioneering social-Zionist organization.