Over forty Roma high school and university students from all over the country participated in the twenty-sixth Baruvas meeting (Romanes “we grow”) in the Jizera Mountains at the end of August. The program offered workshops on hate speech, Roma history, Romani language and traditions, working with emotions, activism, a healthy lifestyle and a space for sharing and support.
Schooling for Roma children in Valais is still lacking. However, a year ago, State Councilor for Education Christophe Darbellay expressed his desire to find an “ad hoc” solution for these traveling children.
Well, they are doing something: Trying to prevent them entering the canton…
The director of the Office for Roma Inclusion of the AP Vojvodina Ljiljana Mihajlović, together with provincial deputy Jelena Jovanović, visited the Vršac College of Education and Medicine with the aim of supporting the enrolment of a new generation of students for the preschool teacher program in the Romani language.
The Slovene government has specified what “Roma Assistants” in the context or primary schools are. One outraged lady was complaining that this was discriminatory, and got the full legal explanation of this job and its description.
Another article on the school dropouts in the Plovdiv region. Apparently, 430 children dropped out last year, prompting the authorities to increase inspections to a total of 22’000. It turns out that 290 of these children dropped out because they left the country. The 140 other who dropped out, according to the news did so because of a “lack of financial opportunities for inclusion in the education system and of course – early marriages.
They could have dropped the “of course” here…
An article about the fact that parking Roma in camps or razing them is not going to resolve the issue and will not bring children to school. In fact, most children in those camps do not go to school at all.
Bad, but nothing new in Italy.
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!
According to the article, due to poverty, migration or early marriages: Over 430 children from Plovdiv region have dropped out of school.
Well a bit further, the article becomes a bit more differentiated: The largest number of children – 290 – dropped out of school due to going abroad. Prof. Hristina Yancheva – regional governor of Plovdiv: “The reasons for dropping out of the education system can be summarized briefly – lack of financial opportunities for inclusion in the education system, migration and of course – early marriages.”
The last point may occur, but there can’t be that many of those …
The Budapest Francophone Journal met with Gábor Erőss, a 52-year-old Hungarian sociologist, researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Center for Social Sciences (TK SzI) and former deputy mayor of Budapest’s 8th district (Józsefváros) between 2019 and 2024. A member of the Párbeszéd Green Party, he exercised his mandate with a clear priority: to combat school segregation in a long-marginalized neighborhood. Trained in France, at Paris Descartes University, then at the EHESS, Gábor Erőss reflects on the educational policies he has implemented and his vision of school as a tool for social emancipation.
The Montenegro Ministry of Education and Science has announced that a competition has been launched for the recruitment of educational mediators to support the education of Roma students for the 2025/2026 school year. The plan is to recruit 85 people, including 50 mediators for primary education and 35 for secondary education.
Well, nice intentions, but will it suffice?
Several ROMEA Fellows are participating in the international educational event Dikh He Na Bister 2025 (“Look and Remember”), which takes place in Poland from July 29 to August 4. The gathering of young people from all over Europe commemorates the genocide of Roma and Sinti during World War II and offers education in human rights and the fight against racism.
Despite affirmative action measures in education, the percentage of Roma children, especially girls, who complete school remains low. In order to empower and support young Roma women, Bibija – the Roma Women’s Center and the Roma Students’ Initiative, with the support of UNICEF, launched the mentoring program “Delimo”.
The Institute of Romology Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health of the University of Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra is closing down after 35 years. At the end of June, the proposal of the Dean of the Faculty, Tomáš Sollár, was approved by the Academic Senate.
The restructuring of the institute is to create a department of social work for Roma communities at the Department of Social Work and Social Sciences. This also includes personnel cuts – from the original three assistant professors and one associate professor, only two assistant professors will remain in the new department.
Says a lot about priorities …
Dafina Paskaleva’s life was not easy: he grew up in an orphanage, because his Roma parents apparently abandoned him as a baby. Everyone told him that he would never amount to anything. Today, he is a teacher who believes in his students – and they in him.
Bulgaria introduced a mandatory religion subject with two options “Orthodoxy” and “Islam”. According to the Centre for Interethnic Dialogue and Tolerance “Amalipe” (a Roma organisation), this may cause tension in ethnically mixed areas and deepen educational segregation. Additional tension may also arise in communities that follow forms of Christianity other than Orthodoxy and Islam other than Orthodoxy, for example, various Protestant denominations, Catholicism.
On Paper, they are full, schools receive subsidies for Roma, but they cannot keep them in the classroom. They cannot keep Roma students, even though they receive millions in subsidies from the state. Schools say they do what they can, but after the end of compulsory school attendance, it is practically impossible.
On the other hand, resident of marginalised Roma communities say “they just get the money for the children here and they don’t care about them anymore”.
According to this article, only 17.5% of children aged 7 to 16 attend the general education system in Soroca, Moldova. The situation was analysed during a public consultation organized by the Ministry of Education and Research in partnership with UNICEF Moldova, IPN reports.
Only issue: No one knows how many Roma are living there…
An editorial following an incident in a football field in a school where a Roma boy took the ball from an ethnic Slovene who fell and had to be brought to a hospital. The Roma boy was deemed “aggressive”.
The editorial argues that ethnicity has nothing to do with capacities, behaviour, and values.
Blaming Roma is simply not an acceptable excuse.
An article about Roma access to education. As usual, in spite of their good intentions, the generalisation is quite obvious: All Roma have issues accessing education. As a result, for the average reader, most Roma must be illiterate.
One speaks here of the most segregated Roma living in segregated settlements, and not of all Roma.
A three-day excursion by students from the Pedagogical College from Klagenfurt (Pädagogische Hochschule Kärnten, Viktor Frankl Hochschule) took place in Prekmurje and Porabje from 14 to 16 May 2025 as part of the seminar Research Learning in the Slovenia Region.
On the first day of the excursion, the students visited the Roma Information Center, which also includes Radio Romic and the Romano Pušča Kindergarten. According to the article, they learned about an example of good practice in the inclusion of preschool Roma children.
Well, Slovenia is not really successful there …
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