Greek law requires that every island with at least one child must have an elementary school, resulting in the country having the lowest student-to-teacher ratio in Europe, at 7.4 in primary school. However, this policy is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain due to the exodus of young families from the islands and declining birth rates. The number of students in Greece has dropped by 13% in seven years. The island of Agistri, with 87 children for three schools and a dozen teachers, exemplifies both the beauty and challenges of this system. The island of Arki had a boy named Khristos who was the sole student of the island's primary school for several years. Pserimos, with a total of 30 inhabitants, reopened its nursery school and then its primary school a few years later to accommodate the evolution of the island's two only babies. These schools significantly lower the average student-to-teacher ratio across the country, which is far below the European average. In contrast, Paris requires adolescents from the islands of the West to attend high school on the mainland in boarding schools. Despite the geographical proximity of Agistri to Athens and Euboea, the island maintains a nursery school, a primary school, and a combined middle school and high school, all staffed by a dozen teachers. According to various censuses, Agistri had between two and three hundred children fifty years ago and three distinct primary schools. Since then, children have become rare, with young adults leaving for the mainland in search of better opportunities or living conditions, taking their children and demographic renewal with them. Maintaining schools on the islands is challenging, particularly in attracting teachers. "If they had a choice, they prefer to teach in Athens," laments the mayor of Agistri. Life on the islands is more expensive and logistically complex, which deters teachers from moving there. After a disastrous 2025 start, where the high school had only half of its nine planned teachers and some students had only two hours of class per day until Christmas, help was decided for the new season, including up to 300 euros per month per teacher to help them pay their rent. Housing has become a minefield on the islands, with rents often exceeding the basic salary of teachers in some months. Cases of teachers sleeping in their cars due to the inability to find accommodation were revealed on Corfu, and on Hydra, another large tourist island, the monthly rent for living on-site exceeds the basic salary of teachers in some months. The deputy mayor in charge of Education admits that one day it will probably be necessary to close the schools, within fifteen or twenty years. In Arki, the primary school has been closed since Khristos left, and no other baby has been born since. Everywhere, low birth rates are pushing schools to close. 714 schools did not reopen for the 2025 school year due to the demographic decline. Maintaining schools on the islands resembles the myth of Sisyphus: struggling to achieve it every year, only to start all over again the next. The combined middle school and high school, a symbol of island shortages, is a collection of prefabricated buildings in place for almost 20 years. "It's a bit depressing," admits one of the middle school students. No purely private playground, a few rooms packed one on top of the other. When they talk to Athenian teenagers, "it's a different standard anyway." A real school building for middle school and high school students is expected to be built within a year, the mayor says. Everything is not rosy, he admits, but local officials do their best with so little. "It is the role of the city to defend its record, and the role of a parent to want the best for their child," defends a mother at the exit of the primary school. Of course, she is happy to see her son educated locally, and not have to take the capricious Aegean Sea, even for ten minutes of navigation. But she admits: like many others, her child will probably never see the Agistri high school, whether it is in prefabricated buildings or real stones, in order to maximize his chances of success. On average, school results and pass rates for national exams are lower in Greek islands, especially the more isolated ones. Certainly, on paper, the student benefits from double the attention from the teacher, but educational shortcomings remain enormous: constant turnover of teachers, young and therefore inexperienced teachers, lack of options in high schools, and the absence of frontistiria, these private lessons that have become almost indispensable to get the best places at university. Teacher unions estimate that 20% to 30% of island students leave their island specifically to do their high school years on the mainland, despite the presence of a local institution.