Prime Minister Edi Rama’s remarks on start of 2018-2019 school year during visit to newly-built Kosova primary school in Tirana:

 

Greetings everyone!

The start of the new school year is a milestone for kids and schoolchildren, but it is a special occasion for me personally to be here at this very right site after a 15-year long battle for this corner of Tirana, worth writing a book about.

A book is worth writing about the previous Albania, because greed and judiciary corruption were all jumbled up, while the school building was burned down and the land site was completely illegally returned and the pine trees were cut down and the site was turned into a parking lot. A lot of efforts followed then to secure the due construction permit in order to erect a high rise building and ultimately occupying this milestone corner of education in Tirana. The previous municipal administration planed construction of a high rise building, but the nightmare ended after the election of new administration in Tirana Municipality and introduction of the new project, which is no longer a 3D project idea, but a reality, right there, in front of our eyes.

Of course, if you turn your head on the left you can’t figure out what is happening on the right side and I believe time is ripe that, together with Mayor Veliaj, we will rid of the right side in order to create a decent space between Kosova primary school and the newly-built court building so that more public space becomes available to children.

Sami Frasheri used to say: “If you are to plant for a season, sow corn and wheat, if you are to plant forever, cultivate education and culture.”

Beyond concrete and obvious things, what we are doing about the education system will gradually yield results over the coming years. However, I know for sure that the foundations for the radical transformation of the education system have been already laid. Starting the new school year with the decision to provide textbooks to schoolchildren in first to fourth grade for free is one of the signals showing the beginning of a radical transformation not just in school infrastructure, but also the curricula, the textbooks and the teaching staff.

I am very pleased that a major project on construction of 17 new school buildings is set to be launched along with the Municipality of Tirana in the next few weeks. The 17 new schools will be constructed under the government’s “1 billion reconstruction program”. The procedures are about to finalize and the implementation of the projects designed by leading international architects will kick off soon.

I would like to extend to schoolchildren, their parents and teachers wholeheartedly wishes for start of a great new school year.

I am convinced that the parents’ investment for their children is increasingly matching with the government investment for children. We will keep doing more and more, because what has been already done is quite significant if compared to the past, but a lot remains to be done considering our objectives.

Thank you very much!