500,000 Students Return
Syria's Ministry of Education announced on Tuesday, 5 May 2026 that more than 500,000 students have returned to classrooms across the country's eastern governorates under an emergency education recovery plan launched on 4 February 2026. The announcement caps roughly 100 days of work to fold long-isolated areas back into the national school system.
The plan covers Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor and Hasaka, along with the Deir Hafer and Miskene areas in the eastern Aleppo countryside. It follows an integration agreement signed between the Syrian government and the Syrian Democratic Forces in late January 2026, weeks after government forces took control of the eastern regions in the middle of the same month.
2,236 Schools Back Online
The ministry reported that 2,236 schools have been opened or returned to service in the eastern provinces, with 42 educational complexes activated alongside them. The Hojan complex in the Deir ez-Zor countryside is named among the schools brought back into the network.
The reopenings target areas that had been outside the official Syrian school system for years and that were administered separately during that period. The ministry framed the rollout as part of a wider effort to restore state services in the east.
38,000 Staff Onto Payroll
The plan also folds 38,000 teaching and administrative staff into Syria's unified government system. The integration moves these workers onto state salaries paid in Syrian pounds (SYP), with direct implications for the central budget and for the stability of education services across the country's eastern Jazira region.
The 38,000-strong cohort sits alongside the 500,000 returning students and the 2,236 reopened schools as the headline figures presented by the ministry on 5 May 2026.
Summer Catch-Up Programs
Education Minister Muhammad Abd al-Rahman Turku said the plan addresses accumulated educational gaps left by years of disruption in the areas now coming back into the system. The National Center for Curriculum Development, headed by Ismat Ramadan, is responsible for the curricular dimension of the rollout.
The plan also includes compensatory summer programs designed to close knowledge gaps for students who spent years cut off from the official school system in regions that had been separately administered. Those summer tracks are part of the same emergency package launched on 4 February 2026.