‘There are no children’: A Greek island has just 2 students left—and its last school is about to close

Chryssa Ntalaka’s classroom has become an object lesson in subtraction.

The sole teacher in the last school on the idyllic Greek island of Kalamos has a shorter list of students every fall. This year, just two. On Sept. 23, the sixth graders sat at Ntalaka’s table beneath the whiteboard, in front of rows of unused desks and benches.

When they head to middle school on Greece’s mainland next year, her school will be mothballed. Toys and picture books still sit on shelves in the nearby kindergarten since it was shuttered three years ago.

“Usually, teachers are placed on these islands against their wishes,” Ntalaka told The Associated Press. “Whereas for Kalamos there are teachers and kindergarten teachers, as far as I know, who want to come — but there are no children.”

Falling enrollment across Greece this year prompted authorities to close 75 schools and suspend or extend suspension of classes at more than 400 others.

It’s a situation playing out across Europe and beyond. The region has 16 of the world’s top 20 oldest nations, particularly in Southern Europe, according to the independent World Population Review.

And its remote communities act as an early warning system: Mountain villages and small islands are among the first places where schools and services disappear in a deepening cycle of population decline. Some 17 million people live on more than 4,000 islands across the European Union; Greece has about 200 of them.

“Closing schools leads to young people not staying and to them leaving,” said Byron Kotzamanis, co-founder of the Institute of Demographic Research in Athens. “Leaving means fewer and fewer people — fewer and fewer births. It means depopulation and dead settlements that will become nursing........

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