Czech EdMin wants stricter criteria for practical school enrollment

The Czech Education Ministry wants to change the methods used for evaluating candidates for the practical (previously called the "special") schools. Within two years, preparatory classes at these schools will be closed, as will pupils’ so-called diagnostic stays in them. Those are the conclusions of working materials which the ministry will present in December to the Council of Europe. The materials, which have been made available to the Czech Press Agency, are the ministry’s response to a five-year-old European Court of Human Rights judgment according to which 18 Romani pupils were unjustifiably transferred to "special schools".

"We do not want social disadvantage to be confused with disability, which means we will make that impossible as of next year," Deputy Education Minister Jiří Nantl said at a session in the Czech Senate on this issue on 13 November. Healthy children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds are frequently enrolled in practical schools intended for the lightly mentally disabled.

The counseling centers that decide whether a child will actually not be able to handle instruction in an ordinary school and must therefore transfer to a practical school will have to use more tests and new diagnostic tools as of next school year. These changes are estimated to cost between CZK 5 and 10 million. The Czech School Inspection Authority will be reviewing the legitimacy of those centers’ evaluations.

The practical schools should also not be allowed to establish preparatory classes or nursery schools. Preschoolers from socially excluded areas often attend such preschool arrangements, with only a very few of them attending classic nursery schools. During the preparatory classes they grow accustomed to what they are obliged to do during school attendance. "Children educated in the preschools located at the practical primary schools can freely continue their educations at those primary schools, which is undesirable," the ministry claims.

Diagnostic stays, during which a troubled pupil is reassigned from an ordinary school to a practical one for up to half a year, will also be restricted. Instead, diagnostic observation will take place during the pupil’s instruction in the ordinary school. That measure will require financial expenditures as well, but the ministry has not yet calculated the costs.

Bureaucrats will also start collecting anonymous statistics about Romani pupils and a forum of NGOs dedicated to this issue will be convened.

Research by the Office of the Ombudsman recently demonstrated that between 32 and 35 % of all pupils attending the "special" schools are Romani even though the estimated number of Romani people in the population of the Czech Republic is between 1.4 and 2.8 %.

According to conclusions published in the Czech School Inspection Authority in August, however, the share of Romani pupils educated as mentally disabled has fallen during the last two years. While previously young Romani people comprised 35 % of the pupils education in programs for the disabled, that number is now reportedly 26.4 %.

The fifth anniversary of the D.H. judgment has recently passed. That judgment confirmed that young Romani people were being discriminated against in the Czech schools. Many organizations, such as Amnesty International and the Open Society Fund, are currently warning that the situation has not changed much during the past five years.

Representatives of the practical schools, however, are protesting the removal of pupils from them. The children are allegedly not there because of their Romani origin, but because troubled pupils receive adequate support in such schools.

"There are no children with normal intelligence in the practical schools. The parents of the children in the practical schools are protesting against their closure and disagree with the proposed changes. They have experience with how their children were ailing in the ordinary schools where the collectives did not accept them and where they had low self-esteem and many psychological problems due to their repeated lack of success," warned Jana Smetanová, the initiator of a petition against the closing of the practical schools. More than 21 000 people have signed the petition online since October 2012.