The Secondary School Teachers' Association announced Thursday that it is considering joining the university students' strike planned for Sunday. Students will go on strike as the second term of the year begins, in an effort to halt government reforms to higher education.

The strike, which students say will continue until their demands are met, has the support of the academic faculty unions.

The student organizations said at a press conference Thursday that they plan to block students from entering all universities and colleges, and that lectures, tutorials and laboratory classes would be canceled.

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Although the faculty organizations at the universities and colleges will not officially strike along with the students, they have voiced support the struggle against the reforms panel, headed by former finance minister Avraham Shochat.

Dr. Leah Mor, chairman of the union of college professors' national committee, and Prof. Zvi Hacohen, chairman of the Coordinating Council of the Senior Faculty Associations, said that the lecturers support the strike and will help students make up the classes they miss.

The current strike is the last step in a struggle that started in November, and included a 24-hour "warning strike."

At a joint press conference with the students' union on Thursday, Secondary School Teachers' Association chairman Ran Erez said, "we have built a unified front with the students and the academic faculty, because their struggle is for the benefit of the education system, as is ours. We are all wronged by the government's disrespectful attitude toward the education system, starting from kindergartens and ending with universities."

The association on Thursday canceled classes in tenth to twelfth grades in all six-year schools, as well as classes in the ninth to twelfth grades in four-year high schools, over stalled negotiations on a collective wages agreement.

The Teachers' Federation, contrary to the Teachers' Association, has decided to hold talks with the Finance Ministry and the Education Ministry over the next two weeks, and has vowed not to strike during these talks.

"The Finance Ministry has shown willingness to reach an agreement on issues like the teachers' eroding wages. The Teachers' Association is not willing to give the treasury a chance, and has begun to strike. The ministries prefer to hold talks with us, and not the Teachers' Association," a source in the Teachers' Federation said Thursday.

Until now, the two teachers' organizations have coordinated with each other their courses of action in facing the finance ministry. The cooperation between the two groups has begun to wane.

"There has not been a total split among the teachers. I am trying to convince Yossi Wasserman (Secretary General of the Teachers' Federation) not to believe the finance ministry's promises. We have been holding talks with the ministry for six months, and we have received nothing, so why should anyone believe that progress will be made in the next two weeks? Wasserman still believes them, but I am unwilling to give them any more time, since the treasury's objective is to buy time and postpone the strike as much as possible," said Erez.

"If pressure exerted by our strike should benefit the Teachers' Federation, then we have completed our mission, because the treasury can't grant anything to the Teachers' Federation without granting us (the Teachers' Association) the same thing," Erez added.

Sunday's planned student strike is shaping up to be the biggest university strike since the student strike of 1998, which led the formation of the Winograd Committee on university tuition.

Although in 2001 the government adopted the committee's recommendation to decrease university tuition by 50 percent, it has only been cut by 26 percent to date.