AFP: Roma in Hungarian schools - are classes mixed or segregated?

AFP reports that over the years at the elementary school in Csobánko, a village northeast of Budapest where many members of the Roma minority live, there have been fewer and fewer faces of majority-society children in the class pictures hanging on the walls of the school. The so-called “white” children started leaving the school in 1989 when it became possible for Hungarians to choose where to send their children to school. This year, the school has only a single pupil from the majority society.

“We are an institution that is open to everyone,” declares school director Andrea Papp. “However, the non-Roma people living here don’t send their children here anymore.” While the facility has been striving for integration, everything has ended up segregated.

Yesterday the European Commission called on the EU Member States to do better at integrating Roma people, particularly through school attendance. Tomorrow the European Platform for Roma Integration, which brings together Commission and NGO representatives, will meet to discus the issue.

Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán made Roma integration one of the priorities of the Hungarian EU presidency, which the country has held since January. There are as many as 700 000 Roma living in Hungary, which has a total population of 10 million. The estimated number of Roma people living throughout the EU is 10 -12 million, 80 % of whom live in former Soviet bloc countries. Roma are the EU’s largest ethnic minority.

“Segregation is forbidden by law. It is bad for the economy, because as a result of segregation, Roma children become unemployed adults dependent on state support,” complains Erzsébet Mohácsi, who heads a foundation for Roma children.

Her foundation is striving to make sure Roma children have the same opportunities as everyone else and sues elementary schools where Roma children are separated into special classes. As a result, as many as 3 000 Roma children have gotten places in facilities that respect their integration, Mohácsi says.

Even though the official policy is to integrate Roma children, they are still separated from other children in roughly one-third of Hungarian elementary schools. This proportion keeps rising – Hungarian Minister for Social Integration Zoltán Balog says the incidence of such segregation has risen 30 % since 2005.

“We’ll never get anywhere if we don’t manage to convince most of society of the importance of Roma integration,” the minister declares. One aspect of the problem is the approach taken by non-Roma residents who responded to increased numbers of Roma children in classrooms by sending their own children elsewhere.

The integration of Roma children can, however, be advantageous. “It is useful to bring children together who have the same behavioral or social problems in order to better respond to their special needs through programs made to measure for them,” the director of the school in Csobánko says.

Experts agree that Roma children whose parents do not help them with their school obligations need special attention from their instructors. Andrea Papp has designed a program for such Roma children but it cannot be tested due to lack of financing. “I am convinced that if we help these children catch up and if we understand what they need for life in this society, these children will have more self-confidence and integration will happen of its own accord,” she stresses.

“We don’t have any miraculous recipe. There is no doubt that the main problems are education and work,” Zoltán Balog says.

Roma unemployment in Hungary is as high as 70 % and is partially explained by Roma people’s poorer educational achievement. Only 5 % of young Roma people complete middle school and a mere 1.2 % go on to college.