Minister of National Education Mahmut Özer and Minister of Interior Affairs Süleyman Soylu monitored the simultaneous earthquake exercise at the Yenimahalle Haydar Aliyev Secondary School. Ministers Özer and Soylu accompanied students during the evacuation of the school and monitored the exercise from the big screen placed at the garden of the school building.

"We will complete building reinforcements of all schools in the country in 2022"

Minister Özer noted during his speech after the exercises that approximately 14 million students and 1 million teachers have attended the exercises carried out simultaneously throughout the country.

Özer stated that a total of 3.5 billion liras were allocated for the school building reinforcements in the last 17 years adding that, "We have reinforced 2,000 school buildings till now and 865 of these buildings were reinforced in the last 2 years. We have demolished 459 school buildings and constructed new ones during the same period. We will complete building reinforcements of all schools throughout the country in 2022."

Pointing out that the Teaching Profession Law has come into force, Özer said that disaster safe schools and disaster and emergency training programs will become a part of expert teacher and head teachers training programs.

Meanwhile, Minister of Interior Affairs Süleyman Soylu noted that Turkey is located on a disaster area and faces earthquakes and other disasters adding that they had declared 2019 and 2020 as the years of disaster preparedness, 2021 as the disaster training year and finally named 2022 as the disaster exercise year.

"We are planning to organize 54,302 disaster exercises in 2022 and we are planning to stage a large exercise in the country towards the end of this year," said Soylu.

Soylu also mentioned that approximately 1 million teachers attended disaster training programs last year and took important missions in the Disaster Response Plan of Türkiye.

Following the speeches, Ministers Özer and Soylu signed the Disaster Exercise Protocol. Deputy Minister of Interior Affairs and Ministry Spokesman İsmail Çataklı, Deputy Ministers of National Education Sadri Şensoy, Petek Aşkar, Nazif Yılmaz, Ankara Governor Vasip Şahin, and Head of the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) Governor Yunus Sezer were also present at the protocol ceremony.