Students, parents and teachers staged a protest in Kurdjali on April 30 against the closure of schools in the city.

Eighty schools are expected to close in the region of the southeastern city Kurdjali, which has a population of about 50 000 people, following the introduction of delegated budgets, private broadcaster bTV reported.

The changes could force students from smaller towns and villages in the area to travel tens of kilometres every day to reach their new schools.

The state will now distribute budgets for education to every municipality, which, in turn, will be able to spend them as it deems fit. In many cases the money is insufficient to support all schools in the region, hence the municipality in question will have to find a way to finance the schools in its jurisdiction or close some of them down.

The problem is not only related to the distances pupils have to travel and the time they will lose in the process. Both teachers and parents are convinced that the situation could undermine children's education. Parents say that it could be a great problem for a small child in first or third grade to travel such great distances every day. Mayors from Kurdjali municipality fear that only about 26 out of 105 schools will remain following restructuring.

The problem is viewed as particularly serious in small settlements. The border village of Tihomir, for example, has a school educating 200 pupils. If their school is shut children will have to travel about 45 km daily to the nearest school. Tihomir school director Vesselin Ouzounov said that the children concerned would have to wake up at least one and a half or two hours earlier. They would also get home much later than usual, so cutting into homework time.

The municipal mayor of the nearby town of Kirkovo, Shukran Idriz, said that certain schools should be left open in the children's interest and their constitutional rights respected. "If all these schools are closed this would mean that those children would not receive the same treatment as their coevals in larger cities," Idriz said.