Of the 180,000 Bedouins in the Negev (in recognized and unrecognized villages) 67% are under the age of 18. This is the highest percentage of youth per capita of any social group in Israel. The average Bedouin woman has 8 children. Of the 45 villages, only 11 have schools, all other children must travel far distances to attend school. This often involves walking 1-5 kilometers to the road, then taking 2 buses to the school. There is only two secondary schools in all of the villages, and as a result drop-out rates are extremely high, and so only a small percentage of students continue on to institutions of higher learning. In addition, many families are not comfortable having their girls travel to another village to go to a mixed-gender school, and so female drop-out rates are very high (60%) following elementary school. Two acceptable solutions were proposed, namely having segregated high schools (as is the case with the religious Jewish school system in Israel) or having high schools in their communities, but both have been rejected or ignored as of now.
The roads in the villages are not paved, and are only wide enough for one vehicle, making school buses at high risk for accidents. One tragic case several years ago illustrates this point, when a young boy was decapitated when two buses passed each other on the road. As a result, the head of the Parents Committee in the village of al-Atrash petitioned the supreme court for wider, paved roads to the schools and actually won the case. The court ruled to create roads, but that decision was ignored and no roads have been paved, or expanded.
In the recognized townships, there was no secondary school until the 1970s. Between the 70s and the mid-90s, there were only two. The result of this is that an entire generation of Bedouin have received only minimal education, and this has seriously affected their chances for employment and self-betterment.
