In addition to Minister Özer, İstanbul Governor Ali Yerlikaya, Author Doğan Hızlan, Provincial Director of National Education Levent Yazıcı, teachers and parents were present at the inauguration ceremony. İstanbul University Itri Fine Arts High School students gave a recital at the ceremony.

 

Minister Özer expressed his happiness to continue face-to-face education during 2021-2022 school year adding that schools must the places which will be opened first and closed last and they are the most secure and protected areas as long as required measures are taken.

 

He said during his keynote speech that Türkiye has a large education population with its 18 million students and 1 million and 200 thousand teachers.

 

"Schooling rate which was 44 percent in 2000s reached 90 percent. Schooling rate among five year old children increased from 14 percent to 90 percent. High education schooling rate showed a similar increase," stated Özer.

 

Minister Özer reminded that the schooling rate of female students increased from 39 percent to 88 percent.

 

"I would like to use this opportunity to express my sincerest gratitude to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for his support to education and allocating the largest share of the budget to our Ministry," noted Özer.

 

On the other hand, the Ministry continues to increase the quality of education and reinforce personal skills while working in an effort to maintain equal opportunities in education.

 

"We are using all the means of our Ministry in an effort to decrease opportunity differences among schools and provide the best school environment for our students. As a first step of this effort, we initiated the "No More Schools Without Libraries" project on October 26, 2021 under the auspices of Emine Erdoğan. There were no libraries in 16,361 schools and libraries were founded in these schools within two months. As of the end of 2021, there are no more schools without libraries in our country," said Özer.

 

Özer mentioned the support of vocational high schools in the establishment of libraries and stressed that the number of books at school libraries exceeded 56 million. 

 

There are approximately 12 thousand books in the newly opened library and it is expected that this figure will increase to 25-30 thousand within a short period of time.