Raising the salaries of the teachers will contribute to enhance the quality of the education. The opinion is shared by teachers, schoolmasters and economists, who attended Thursday the Chisinau Press Club, organized by the Independent Journalism Center and the Committee for Press Freedom, Info-Prim Neo reports. The quality of education cannot be high without qualified and well-payed personnel, says Serafima Rurcanu from the Education and Science Trade Union. 15.6% of school teachers are retirees now. The young teacher account for only 8% of the total, but they also work for the 30-thousand-lei indemnity the Government gives to young teachers in villages, and they leave after the first year of work scared by the small salaries. The Moldovan schools now need over 2,000 teachers. Subjects as informatics and biology are taught by employees graduating from 11-year schools. A teacher with higher education gets 785 lei a month. 57% of teachers have to do extra-work to survive. Because of these conditions, the teachers are often too tired to be always receptive and attentive, Serafima Turcanu says. If the teachers had big salaries, more of them would get employed, thinks Iulia Atanasov from lycee Mihai Eminescu from Chisinau. They teachers seeking for jobs abroad would return home. Contests would be held to select the best specialists. When asked: “Does the Government has money to raise the teachers' wages or not?” the economist Veaceslav Ionita from IDIS Viitorul think tank answers with a similar question: “Does a parent have money to feed his children?” In this case the question is not about possibilities, but about the state's priorities. The expert says the present system of financing the public education has multiple faults. Although the money allocated by the state to school education for the last years grew considerably, this has not resulted in enhancing the quality of the education, in bettering the conditions in schools, because this money is managed inadequately. “No matter how much water you can pour in a bucket with holes,” Veaceslav Ionita says. IDIS Viitorul has developed a study as to financing the school education. They found that it is not implemented as a state policy meant to improve the education services for citizens, but rather to rather to hold under passive control the largest category of earners from the state budget. Still they go on receiving the lowest salaries in the country, under the minimum salary in the national economy. The expenditures on education have no relation with the number of pupils in a class, the experts find, but only to the law on salaries for budget earners. A solution may be found only after reviewing the official approach of the education services provided by the Government (the minimum guaranteed package and standards). According to the research, the schools are extremely vulnerable in front of the political influence and of the administrative capacity of some extra-school entities (the local and district authorities independently conduct the money allocated for education from the public budget), what reduces from the responsibility for the final result and for the efficient usage of resources. The IDIS specialists consider the public education urgently needs decentralization efficiency improvement. The education trade unions protested in front of the Government for a week, starting September 1. They plan mass protests on September 25. The education and science trade unions demand that teachers’ salaries are raised by 600 lei from September 1 and by another 900 lei from January 2009. By July 2009, the salaries of teaching staff should be equal to the minimum subsistence level.