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Czech experts believe centrally-located schools lead out of the ghetto

16 December 2013
4 minute read

The primary schools in the neighborhood of the Czech city of Brno referred to locally as the "Bronx" are almost exclusively attended by Romani children, and you won’t normally find other kinds of children enrolled there. Activists want to integrate these Romani children more into the rest of society.

"Society will benefit from Roma inclusion. Just calculate how much a person who spends his or her life on unemployment benefits costs the state, not to mention the cost of debts owed for housing and the cost of crime rates," says Jana Horváthová, director of the Museum of Roma Culture in Brno.  

Three years ago the Museum attempted to assist six Romani children with enrollment into primary schools located in the center of Brno. "These were gifted children, each one had a mentor and they all came to us for after-school tutoring," Horváthová says.

"We are still working with five of those children, only one girl returned to the primary school on Vranovská Street," says Petra Banďouchová of the Museum. "It was the parents’ decision, her mother said it was easier for her to have the child attend a school near their home than for her to commute, the girl was an average pupil," says Dan Jedlička, principal of the Sirotkova Primary School.  

This particular project has succeeded. However, inclusion in general is not progressing.

Romani children, in the majority of cases, end up at primary schools located in a ghetto. Today many Romani children are graduating from technical schools, but their stories once their educations end are often the same as if they had never gone to school:  enrolling with the local labor office, being unemployed, racking up debts, living in bad housing situations, and crime.

According to activists, Romani people need to attend "non-Romani" schools in order to be included into mainstream society and get a chance at a better life. Currently more than 50 children, most of them from Brno’s "Bronx", are receiving tutoring at the Museum of Roma Culture. 

The most important role, however, is played by the children’s parents. They must want their children to commute to schools outside the ghetto.

Entire Romani families attend primary schools in excluded localities on 28. října Square, Křenová and Vranovská Streets. "This community sticks together, it’s a cultural model that works. Romani children feel excluded at schools in the center where the majority of children are ‘non-Romani’," explains Libor Tománek, Vice-Principal of the local primary school on 28. října Square.      

Tománek has focused on educating Romani children. "We have many programs to assist them here. Many special teaching aids, several kinds of assistance, and two teachers per classroom," he describes.

The vice-principal says it is not a "handicap" for Romani children to study together. "These days most of them also continue on to high school," he adds.

"Families that decide to send their children to a school outside of a socially deprived area must be economically better off. They must arrange transportation for their children and buy them supplies. If they leave their child enrolled at one of the schools in the ghetto, they don’t have to do any of that," says Petra Banďouchová of the Museum of Roma Culture. 

She believes everything begins at preschool age. "I am an advocate of preschool education. If children don’t go to nursery school, they don’t learn Czech properly, their start is much more difficult," Banďouchová says.   

There are not enough places available in the nursery schools, however, and most of them cost money, so Romani people prefer to leave their children to play on the streets of their communities. "Children from excluded localities don’t know what ordinary relationships in society are like, they don’t know life among the ‘non-Roma’, they don’t even know what it’s like to go into the countryside, to see nature. When we took some of them on a field trip to the forest, some of them were afraid of butterflies, for example," says Museum of Roma Culture director Horváthová.

Another problem is the approach toward integrated education taken by "non-Romani" parents. These adults often do not want their children to learn in the same classrooms as young Romani children.

"When we combined the school on 28. října Square with the one on Stará Street, the ‘white’ children left and the school became exclusively Romani. ‘Non-Romani’ parents were probably afraid that discipline and the level of instruction were going to decline," explains Martin Jelínek of the local municipal Department of Schools, Youth and Physical Education. 

"Efforts to include Romani children into the regular schools have been made here, but they have never met with much success. I am not certain whether Romani people care to attend ‘non-Romani’ schools," Jelínek claims.

The bureaucrat considers the situation now to be stabilized. He also considers preschool education to be the most important.

"Some children don’t speak Czech when they start first grade. If the Romani children were to undergo at least the preschool level of instruction, then I would be in favor of principals accepting them to the ‘non-Romani’ schools," he says.

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