EU says Czech Republic discriminates against Romany children
The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has criticized the
Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary for allegedly discriminating against
Romanies from an early age by sending many of them to special schools for
people with learning difficulties. The EU report suggests that this
practice is at the root of the government's inability to deal with the
integration of Roma into society as such, because wrongful assignment to
special education has far reaching negative consequences for future
employment opportunities.
Some 250,000 Romanies are thought to live in the Czech Republic and many of
them say it is impossible to find work. Few have more than primary school
education and according to a report commissioned by the EU close to
seventy percent of them end up in schools for children with learning
disabilities. This is largely because they come from a different language
and cultural background which gives them a huge handicap.
Under pressure from the European Commission the Czech government has
recently undertaken steps to address the problem, introducing special
pre-school language classes, Romany councillors and officially committing
itself to dissolving "special schools" for children with
learning disabilities. Ondrej Gabriel from the Education Ministry's press
department says he is disappointed that this activity had gone
unregistered:
"We are open to any kind of discussion on how to help integrate Roma
children but the dialogue must be based on facts and this report does not
reflect present day reality. The Czech education ministry invests millions
of crowns annually into the integration Roma children into Czech
schools."
Kumar Vishwanathan who works with the Romany community and is involved in
some of the Romany integration projects says that the measures taken are
not in themselves sufficient and that although "special schools"
have been officially dissolved they continue to exist under a kinder label
and Romany children still get sent there.
"There have been quite a lot of approaches over the past few years.
Fundamentally, the Czech government has recognized that there is a problem
and it has dissolved all special schools - formally at least. But in its
essence hardly anything has changed. The segregation is still continuing,
the sub-standard education is still continuing, the teachers are not
prepared to meet the individual needs of these children. There are some
positive changes that, if compounded with other initiatives, will
definitely help in the long run, but they are not sufficient at present.
Things like zero-level classes, then there are the teaching assistants in
schools but once again it is not very systematic because many schools find
it difficult to raise funds for these assistants and generally they give
up. Then there are NGO activities such as working with pre-school
children, programmes called Step-by-Step, then there are such Dutch models
being used by our organization to prepare parents to cope with the needs of
their children and give them support. But these are all very small
initiatives and I still haven't seen any fundamental change, a significant
move that would really change the situation. If the situation continues
like this these children are not going to be able to fit into society,
they will not be able to fit into the labour market and that is a great
tragedy."
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