#6226
[Second Issue of the Day]
#2
Newsday
May 5, 2002
Russia's Lesson in Population Decline
By Liam Pleven
MOSCOW CORRESPONDENT
Sennoye, Russia - Natasha Glazyeva gives the correct answer to every math problem posed. When the subject is spelling, it is the same 8-year-old girl who gets called on each time. And when her teacher checks Natasha's homework in class, she pronounces it flawless.
A smart little girl, clearly. But in this class, the round-cheeked, pony-tailed Natasha is also the only student. In fact, she is the only pupil in the entire four-room schoolhouse, just as she was last year in this tiny Russian farming village, where the population has been dwindling for decades.
Every nugget of praise from the teacher, Yelena Panfilova, is for Natasha alone and every gentle scolding to work on handwriting or remember a grammatical rule is aimed at her as well. During breaks, Natasha bounces a ball off a wall in an empty classroom or helps Panfilova weed around the narcissus outside. In winter, they sometimes go skiing.
After classes on a recent spring afternoon, Natasha said the school is "fine," though she added, "Of course, I'd like to play with somebody."
But to just about everyone else in Sennoye - and to many Russians beyond - Natasha's predicament is troubling. It also is evidence of a painful problem.
Across this vast country, the population is in decline, and villages such as Sennoye have few jobs with which to hold young families. Cash-strapped governments can pay the sometimes steep cost of keeping open rural primary schools with shrunken student bodies. Or they can try to close them, a move some view as tantamount to a death sentence for villages where the school is often one of the few signs of communal life.
Russia has 5,679 primary schools with fewer than 10 students, most of them in rural areas, according to the education ministry; one official estimated that 200 to 300 of the small schools have only one student.
At least three of the single-student schools are in the state of Voronezh, which includes Sennoye, according to another education official. And the cost of operating the Sennoye school is striking: About $1,700 a year, approximately eight times the per-student cost in the rural district where Natasha lives, according to local officials. In Voronezh as a whole, the teacher-student ratio is 12-1, not 1-1.
"Our budget can't support this," said Lyubov Alyokhina, who oversees education in the Ramonsky regional government, which covers most of Sennoye's education costs and has sought to close Natasha's school for two years.
But Sennoye, which lacks even paved roads, seems to be barely hanging on. Locals have resisted the efforts so far, relying on a federal law that prohibits shutting a school without local consent, and residents say there are other children who will reach school age soon.
"If the people believe that the village will develop, you can't take this hope away from them. Hope is more expensive than money," said Yakov Lvovich, an official in the education department for the state of Voronezh.
The reasons for the large number of small schools are straightforward. Russia has a population of about 140 million - just more than half that of the United States - but its people are spread across a land almost twice as large. Industrial migration helped drain many villages during the course of a half-century in what was then the Soviet Union, and a lack of rural work opportunities dims the prospects for a reversal.
Russia's population also is contracting. Nearly twice as many people died last year as were born, and the trend was even more severe in the state of Voronezh, where there were a little more than 18,300 births but almost 44,000 deaths.
In the mid-1950s, 560 people were registered at Sennoye's collective farm, an official said, and at least 200 remained in the mid-'70s, according to a longtime resident. Now, the village has about 100 people, by many estimates, most of them older.
Rare are young parents such as Natasha's, who left the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan for Sennoye three years ago because it was the ancestral village of her father, Pyotr Glazyev.
Yet when the proposal came to shut Natasha's school, her parents rejected the alternatives, which included sending her to a boarding school or on a long walk across roadless and often-snowy terrain to a nearby town.
Instead, Glazyev said, the authorities should provide basic equipment such as books for Natasha's studies.
"A school should be a school," he said.
In Sennoye's spare classrooms, the educational tools bear the marks of age. A turntable holds a record of poetry recitals compiled by the Ministry of Culture of the Soviet Union, a country that ceased to exist more than 10 years ago.
Natasha and Panfilova work in the former teachers' lounge, looking across two desks pushed together. On a recent day, the lesson turned to logic sequences, requiring Natasha to break down into five steps the process of getting and eating an apple. She, however, could think of only four steps: Picking it, washing it, washing her hands and eating it.
"What else can you do with an apple?" Natasha asked.
"Maybe you can cut it with a knife," Panfilova responded.
"Why?" Natasha asked.
"Just to be civilized. When you have guests, you would cut it, I suppose." Panfilova said.
"If I had guests, I would cut it," Natasha agreed. "But when I'm alone, I'll just eat it."
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