Vrnograc Municipality, in the northern-most part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is suffering from a shortage of students. Due to the increasing migration of residents, three regional schools were closed in the past year.

According to Camil Cuturic, Director of the regional elementary school of Prvi Mart from Vrnograc, this school once had six district schools. This number is now down to three, and the number of students that used to attend these schools has halved.

“When I first started working here, the school had 800 students, and now it’s down to 400. Everything kept going backwards in the past three years. We always used to replace the missing students with the beginning of a new school year; however, the migration trend intensified and we simply had no more students,” Cuturic told Anadolu Agency.

In spite of this lack of students, Cuturic said the school does not suffer from the redundancy of employees because they recognised the problem on time and stopped giving permanent contracts to future employees.

“We currently have 54 employees, of which 38 teachers, but not all work full time. Some of them work only 10 percent of the norm, some 30 percent,” Cuturic said. “We’ve never had redundancy cases because we’ve always employed several teachers via fixed-term contracts, so their contracts would end at the end of the year and we’d hire them back if we needed to.”

He told Anadolu Agency that the future of this municipality is bleak at best. The migration trend is becoming ever more visible, and people are leaving even if they have a job and regular salaries because they see no point in staying here.

“There’s no future here. Even the biggest optimists who always talked about staying and fighting till the end are now leaving. Entrepreneurs here, in Velika Kladusa, are always looking for workers, but they’re nowhere to be found. Only recently have the local entrepreneurs came up with the idea to raise salaries, but too little too late, I’m afraid. Most of the workforce has left the country.”

The future of the 15,000 Vrnograc residents is uncertain. Struggles with healthcare, sewage, water drain and the lack of Registrar's Office ate taking their toll. Nothing functions in this Municipality, which is forcing people to leave, even more. With their departure, the students are moving as well, which is slowly erasing this Municipality from its existence.