Slovakia: Desegregation

Just two years ago, all poor children from the Pod Pustým hradom area in Zvolen sat in the classrooms of one elementary school. Students from the majority population gradually left it.

More than half (57 percent) of all socially disadvantaged children in Zvolen attended this school. The other five schools in the city had no such students at all or very few of them.

However, in 2022, the city of Zvolen began to address the segregation of Roma students by redefining school districts. Simply put, children from the poor community no longer belonged to one school district, and therefore to only one of the Zvolen schools.

They now began to assign them to school districts not by street, but by entrance numbers. Today, children from generational poverty no longer fall under one Zvolen school, but attend three – one private and two public.

This is good!