Tag Archives: Segregation

News Eastern Europe Slovakia

Slovakia: Special Schools

Published by:

“Every teacher should teach at least one year at a special school. It will significantly affect his life both personally and professionally. It will acquire important values.” This is the advice for all teachers from the Slovak woman of the year 2021 in the field of education and the director of a unique school in Kežmark.

Unfortunately, this is a segegrated Roma school, and a pilot in Slovakia. This is not how integration is done.

Czech Republic News Eastern Europe

EU, Czechia and Roma

Published by:

The European Commission has sent a formal notice to the Czech Republic for failing to comply with EU anti-discrimination rules, citing the continued segregation of Roma children in schools.

The Commission has found that many Roma children are disproportionately placed in schools for children with disabilities or in separate classes, despite reforms aimed at ending the segregation of Roma children.

News Eastern Europe Slovakia

Education and Minorities

Published by:

An article about the issue of seggregated schools versus the right to being taucht in one’s language. Background is the current drive by the Fico government to set up a school in Eastern Slovakia where teaching will be done in Romanes.

This is a false debate. All Roma who speak Romanes are dual language speakers. They speak the local language and Romanes. Desegregation is thus the key here, together with some courses about Romanes. Segregation and Romanes only schools will certainly no solve any issue.

News Eastern Europe Slovenia

A Diatribe

Published by:

Another one of those extremist Slovenians diatribes. This one claims a bias against Western Civilisation (when mentionning LGBT etc.). The article says that: “Left-wing politics, the media and non-governmental organizations have been convincing us for decades that they are a neglected ethnic group.”

Bad.

Czech Republic News Eastern Europe

Czechia, a Military Region, and Roma

Published by:

The story of a small vilalge called Květušín in Czechia, a village that was once German, and whose population was deported after the war, and became a military district. Roma settled there and the govrnment created a special school for Roma, promising children would be taken good care. The idea, however, was the create new people, and insulate them from their Roma background.

News Eastern Europe Slovenia

Slovenia: A Successful Settement?

Published by:

The local community of Pušča shows a rather different image of a Roma settlement compared to the Roma settlements in Dolenjsko. In the village there is a shop, a fire brigade, a football club and also a bookstore. The kindergarten, which has been around for more than 60 years, is especially important.

In the Romano kindergarten in Pušča, in addition to the teachers, there is also a Roma helper who makes sure that the children from the village get used to everyday life in the kindergarten as soon as possible.

Nice, but this is segregated schooling, which is not good.

 

News Eastern Europe Slovenia

Slovenia: Another View on a Roma Settlement

Published by:

We are not all the same, say the Roma at the community center in the Brezje Roma settlement in Novo Mesto. The coordinator for Roma groups at the DRPD, Elzana Adnan Odjoski, deals with them there. She runs a program aimed at teenagers and young mothers, in which young people from the age of 15 are involved.

The young mothers agree that their children should go to kindergarten, but not to a Roma kindergarten, but to a normal kindergarten, where they get to know other children and learn the language at the same time. They also said that “Some talk to us, some don’t even look at us, and some immediately run away when they see us”.

Czech Republic News Eastern Europe

School Segregation in Czechia

Published by:

In the Czech Republic, there are still 130 segregated schools where Roma make up at least a third of the students. Veronika Hlaváčová’s documentary brings the experiences of Roma whose children ended up in such classes and points to the vast differences in the quality of education.

“Normally, the teacher leaves us there and goes to the office because she has her child there. Completely disinterested,” describes Zdeněk in the documentary. He attends the eighth grade along with 14 other Roma. “We come to school, the teacher comes, we have mathematics and he tells us, for example, to write something down and we do whatever we want for the rest of the lesson,” he adds.

 

News Eastern Europe Slovenia

Slovenia: An accord

Published by:

In the town of Ribnica, in Southeastern Slovenia, Roma organizations and the management of the municipality met at a joint meeting. Among other things, they agreed that the municipality will provide drinking water to two settlements when the residents there meet a set of requirements. The municipality requires that Roma, among other things, be get involved in the integration process, send their children to school regularly, clean up the settlement and determine land boundaries.

In brief: So that the municipality provides a service that is due to all its residents, Roma have to fulfil some criteria. Especially the integration one, how will they measure that?

News Eastern Europe Slovenia

Slovenia: Civil Initiative

Published by:

Since in their views, the state’s measures in the field of solving the Roma problem have been unsuccessful, the Regional Civil Initiative for solving the Roma problem demands that the government invite them to a meeting within a month. “We want to check whether they will accept the proposals formulated by the 11 mayors of the southeast region,” explained Silva Mesojedec: “If the government does not accept us, we will no longer prevent the creation of village guards and other forms of organizing residents.”

The proposal was refused on the grounds that it singled out a minority, i.e. was not conform to the constitution.

News Eastern Europe Slovenia

Slovenia: A More Differentiated View

Published by:

A much more differentiated article about the issues with Roma in Slovenia. It says that after thirty years of deliberate neglect of the minority, politics will now finally agree that something must be done. What the consensus now is, unfortunately is, is to limit and deprive the Roma of social rights, to make life even more difficult in general, and even to adopt stricter criminal legislation especially for them.

News Eastern Europe Slovenia

Slovenia: Lone Voice

Published by:

A lone voice in Slovenia setting context about the Roma “problem”. She states that a summer without particularly prominent problems with illegal migrants brought political activation at the expense of problems with another convenient group, the Roma, who, unlike the first, are considered some kind of imaginary “internal enemies”.

In brief, once is creating some scapegoats based on effective petty criminality, whose causes (exclusion and racism) are totally excluded.

Dangerous.

News Eastern Europe Slovakia

Reaction to the Slovak Experiment

Published by:

A Slovak MP, Ingrid Kosova criticizes the project of the Ministry of Education to teach Roma children in Romanes. She says that up to 65 percent of Roma children encounter segregation during education. They do not encounter other children, they lose the opportunity to escape from the environment of generational poverty. It is not just a historical, cultural or economic question. It is first and foremost a deeply moral question. The consequences of segregation in schools are humiliating and dehumanizing. First of all, politicians can change it. However, they are failing miserably, and the result is that, according to the data of the European Union, Slovakia is the worst in terms of segregation among the member states. And the situation continues to worsen.

News Eastern Europe Slovakia

Slovakia and Roma Education

Published by:

The Slovak Ministry of Education launched a pilot project where Roma children are taught in Romanes. This is a scandal and cementing the segregation of Roma in school. It certainly will not help integration.

News Eastern Europe Slovakia

Slovakia and Roma

Published by:

After a recent visit to Slovakia, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Michael O’Flaherty called on the Slovak authorities to urgently address the “terrible living conditions” of thousands of Roma. In the east of Slovakia, he visited Stará Tehelňa in Prešov, Jarovnice, Petrovany, Luník IX in Košice and Kecerovce, where he met with representatives of Roma communities, local authorities and groups working with Roma.

“Prejudice against Roma is deeply rooted in society. Discrimination affects all areas of Roma life in Slovakia: from placing Roma women in separate maternity wards to segregated Roma children in education. Many Roma are deprived of access to adequate housing and are rejected in job interviews, ” he stated.

Czech Republic News Eastern Europe

Roma and Czech Schools

Published by:

A dreadful reportage in a segregated school in the Czech Republic. Karel Rajchl, the director of the Vojanova Elementary School in Děčín says that getting children and their families to cooperate is often almost impossible.

“Shh, they’re writing a test,” she warns, upon entering the seventh-grade physics class. The teacher replies “It doesn’t matter, they can’t do anything anyway”. In the last pews, two boys don’t even bother to have an open notebook in which to calculate the task entered on the blackboard, they just giggle. “These boys are one step away from raping our young female teachers,” states principal Rajchl dryly as he leaves the class again.

No Comments…

Uncategorized

Bosnia and Exclusion

Published by:

Around 400 Roma live in Mostar. Excluded from a very young age due to lack of support from the education system and the government, they suffer discrimination and prejudice. A double punishment for these citizens who fight every day for their inclusion.

rroma.org
en_GBEN
de_DEDE fr_FRFR en_GBEN