The Cabinet for Strengthening Haifa and the North Tuesday approved NIS 700million to reinforce the education system in the area over the next two years, NIS 340 million of which will come from external funding sources.

The program will be launched in the coming weeks, beginning with 500,000 children in kindergartens and schools in the North as well as areas bordering the Gaza Strip. It will include splitting up large first- and second-grade classrooms, tutoring weaker students for their matriculation exams, building about 350 classrooms and kindergartens and introducing reinforcement programs for 50 failing schools, among other things.

About 55 percent of the budget is earmarked for minority communities: schools in the Arab, Bedouin, Druze and Circassian communities.

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Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the four ministers who attended Tuesday's meeting that by the end of 2007 the state's investment in communities in the North and the "Gaza envelope" would reach NIS 2.8 billion.

In a press briefing held at the Education Ministry yesterday, Education Minister Yuli Tamir said the idea for the program was not actually connected to the war. "The difficulties of the education system in the North do not stem from the war, and we have already solved the immediate difficulties that did stem from the war," Tamir said. "This is an education system with longstanding difficulties, and we are trying to deal with the sources of this difficulty through this program."

Tamir's statements provoked anger among council heads and education department directors in the south, where the education system suffers from similar problems.

"I protest the institutionalized insanity that goes on in Israel," the head of Be'er Sheva's Department of Education, Rubik Danilovich, said. "Approving giant budgets for northern communities neglects the South. It is inconceivable that the South will have to cope for years with the social war and will receive no succor for its great need."

Danilovich says that in a meeting with Tamir he was promised that the ministry would allot budgets for developing aid programs for the education system in the South.

NIS 40 million of the northern aid scheme will go to dividing up first- and second-grade classes in mathematics and Hebrew. Classes with more than 28 pupils will be split into two smaller classes for seven weekly hours of instruction.

The director-general of the Education Ministry, Shmuel Abuav, said it is not known how many of these classes will have two teachers in one classroom and how many of them will be able to have separate classrooms for the reduced classes.

Mechanisms for diagnosing learning disabilities in young children will be introduced, and NIS 40 million will be added to the tutoring and counseling budget for about 20 percent of students in higher grades to help them to achieve higher bagrut matriculation exam scores. The NIS 80 million for the above items will be added to the regular education budget so that the programs can continue beyond the special plan for the North.