Equal Education for Everyone

The Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality offers its residents a high-quality, egalitarian educational system which provides progressive services to some 60,000 local children and youth aged 3 to 28 years old – secular and religious, Arabs and Jews, children and migrant workers and new immigrants, both in regular and special education.

Equal Education for All

In the educational system about 8800 children attend 305 kindergartens, about 23’000 attend 73 elementary schools and about 20’000 attend 24 high schools. Apart from the school services it is required to provide by law, the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality also operates day-school centers which make it possible for pupils and students to experience structured educational and social activity until the evening hours. To this end it provides hot meals to 1,600 pupils and students and operates 56 classes for supplementary study and preparation for matriculation examinations, as well as additional study centers to help pupils and students facing difficulties. This service is an integral component of the high-quality, egalitarian educational system provided by the municipality to the city’s tens of thousands of pupils and students.

Tel Aviv-Yafo emphasizes persistence of approach and continues in its efforts to maintain the decreasing trend already achieved in the number of dropouts from the school system. It also invests in improving educational achievement levels and increasing the proportion of students who successfully complete their high school matriculation examinations.

Both in the kindergartens and the schools, the municipality offers supplementary programs in basic skills – including the Hebrew language, mathematics, English and science, as well as a variety of subjects to foster excellence at all age levels in order to make it possible for pupils and students to realize their potential. Additional educational programs deal with preventing dangerous behaviors and fostering optimal environmental conditions, as well as empowerment and leadership development in order to increase the degree of involvement and commitment of students and pupils to a variety of subjects and values, such as the environment. A unique program – Enlisting with Values – which have developed in cooperation with the Israel Defense Forces Educational Corps, offers twelfth grade students special tools for decision making and moral – ethical thinking on the eve of their induction into military service.

In the context of this education toward values approach, the municipality plans to begin a new program of enhancing heritage awareness and national identity through contact with Jews abroad. This program will become an integral component of the curriculum. A special program to foster Hebrew culture in Israel’s first Hebrew city will incorporate components of Jewish culture, Hebrew language and creativity, Zionism and the Land of Israel.

Independent School Administration

As in the most progressive of cities in the Western world, all of Tel Aviv-Yafo’s schools are managed independently, in both educational and administrative affairs. Moreover, the schools independently acquire additional resources to serve their needs and to improve their achievements.

Life in the Third Millennium: More computers, more science

The Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality invests huge resources to enhance scientific – technological education in local kindergartens and schools. Each year the educational systems computers are upgraded old computers are replaced by new ones and communications infrastructures are renewed as required. All this is done in order to maintain a high technological level and to allow the educational institutions to improve their teaching and computer-aided learning procedures. All of the city’s schools are connected to the web and operate a number of computerized programs in the following fields: Linguistic (in the context of “Acquiring Written Language Skills in a Computer Environment” program), ecology, knowledge communities (such as Authors’ Discussions and Web Norms of Discussion) and memorializing fallen solders (in the context of the “From Commemorating Warriors to the Value of Heritage” program).

Special Education

Tel Aviv-Yafo’s 16 special education schools serve the needs of all the relevant groups in the city. There are schools for children suffering from cerebral palsy, for autistic children and adults, for deaf people, for pupils and students with mental disorders who are hospitalized periodically, for those with learning disabilities and three schools for children and youth with behavioral difficulties. There are also 37 kindergarten classes for children with special needs, 70 special classes in regular elementary schools and 38 special classes in regular high schools. The municipality provides service for kindergarten children in treatment centers which offer diagnoses and educational treatments such as preparation for first grade, psychotherapy by licensed physiologists, and other forms of treatment – such as art and drama therapy.

Tel Aviv-Yafo as an Educational Center

Tel Aviv-Yafo is also a center of higher education. Tel Aviv University, with its 13 extensions, is Israel’s largest university and recognized by all as an important center of learning and academic research. The city also houses a variety of other academic institutions and collages which offer post secondary educational opportunities in virtually any field: art, photography, dance and the free professions – such as law, journalism and communications.

In March 2004 the Fomento for Behaviral Sciences Building was inaugurated – the first building of the Academic Collage pf Tel Aviv-Yafo. In the coming years new buildings to serve the Computer and Social Sciences Departments will be built on the campus, as well as an administration building.