The story is about a Greek school which will close after this school year. When you have no children – who said “Demographics is Destiny”?
When they head to middle school on Greece’s mainland next year, her school will be mothballed. Toys and picture books still sit on shelves in the nearby kindergarten since it was shuttered three years ago.
Falling enrollment across Greece this year prompted authorities to close 75 schools and suspend or extend suspension of classes at more than 400 others.
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And its remote communities act as an early warning system: Mountain villages and small islands are among the first places where schools and services disappear in a deepening cycle of population decline. Some 17 million people live on more than 4,000 islands across the European Union; Greece has about 200 of them.
“Closing schools leads to young people not staying and to them leaving,” said Byron Kotzamanis, co-founder of the Institute of Demographic Research in Athens. “Leaving means fewer and fewer people — fewer and fewer births. It means depopulation and dead settlements that will become nursing homes.”