Education remains off limits for children Slavka KUKOVA
31 January 2006 Stara Planina Mountain, Ilakov Rut village A team from the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee visits a home for children with developmental disabilities. The building has been repaired recently and is depressingly warm. The head of the facility, the nurses and the teachers consider themselves to be the ·mothers of the children”, and they are in a ·very poor condition”. Children aged between four and 20 are gathered in two rooms with one TV set each and a multitude of chairs and benches. The children are quiet and obedient. To every question that we ask, we hear the whispered response, ·They cannot”, ·They are very underdeveloped”. The children who can speak welcome us with songs and an overwhelming desire to make themselves liked, because they know that people coming from the outside often bring toys and food. We do not. I have been witnessing this situation since 2001. In the meantime, ministries and government agencies are drafting and issuing strategy paper after strategy paper about decentralization, integration and individual programmes for the development and education of the children. Monitoring researches are being carried out, reports with recommendations are being published, but nobody cares to inform the people on the front line about these activities. The head of the facility that we are visiting is neither new in the post, nor has he been on leave. She is surprised at every question we ask about the children’s education. She tells us that a year ago, a journalist from the Bulgarian National Television did a story about the home and picked two children whom she took to Sofia for a psychiatric examination. The psychiatrist and his team from the Alexandrovska Hospital concluded that the children were capable of studying. The head of the home then asked her colleague at the Novo Selo special school, near the city of Veliko Turnovo, if there were any vacant places at her school. In this way, the two children were enrolled in the school. The Novo Selo special school even said that they had room for more children with disabilities. The head of the home decided that two other children, who were ·more preserved” and ·clever” could go to Novo Selo and sent them for assessment by a school commission. The two children were also enrolled and started studying. She told us that she did not keep in touch with the regional education inspectorate, and was unaware they had requested any information about the four children who had been sent to the school in Novo Selo. At the home, we enter a room with 15 children - the serious cases. Only one of the children speaks to us. She shows us the socks that she is knitting and tells us she sells
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them for 2 Leva each (1 Eur). The rest do not communicate with us. They just stare at a point in front of them and sway to and fro. Some clapped their hands as we entered the room. Others had scars on their faces. The nurses tell us that children hurt themselves by hitting their heads against the walls. This is why the staff wraps the children in blankets so that their hands are not free. Some of the children abruptly pull back when we try to touch them. We are told they are severely brain damaged and that’s why they do it. The second group of children consists of two separate small groups because the teacher of one of the groups is on leave. Children with different abilities count from 1 to 10 out loud together with their teacher. She holds a child that cannot walk in her arms. Some of the children immediately ask us where we come from and why we are there. They say they want to leave the home. Others ask me for a piece of paper and start writing the letters that they know. I ask Stanislav, who can write his name and the entire alphabet, why he isn’t at school. He looks back understandingly and replies: ·They will send me this year. I had to turn 14”. At the same time Dimitar holds my hand, with the clear determination to keep me for leaving. His eyes say a lot. He cannot speak, but he can hear. His medical records reveal that he was born from a normal pregnancy and had lived with his mother for a year. His development rapidly deteriorated upon admission to the home. According to the personnel, a speech therapist was working with him. Dimitar is also 14. We also meet the group leader. He had been through every kind of childcare institution. He is already 20 and wants to go to another home. We ask the head of the home why the children are not in school. She says they are uneducable. We ask her if they had problems with finding funding for education. She said that they did not. She explained that there was no psychologist in the area who could examine the children, and the assigned psychiatrist had become head of a hospital department and had no time to visit the home. However, even when he had visited, he had never changed a diagnosis but had only examined the children who were aggressive or had behavioural problems. 30 January 2006 Mindia village, Special school The BHC last visited this school in 2002. We want to see what has changed since then. At 11 am we see a group of children who tell us that they are going to have lunch in about an hour. They say they have finished their classes for the day. Two teachers turn up in 15 minutes. There are 80 children in the school, but only half of them actually study. Most of the parents do not even bring their children back after holidays. The staff does not have the funds to
with developmental disabilities fetch the children from their homes so that they can attend school. We saw the large bedrooms, with 16 to 17 beds and no personal belongings, no posters, textbooks or books. Only beds from Germany, and a computer hall with 10 PCs. We inspect the classrooms for the beginner classes, which are cold and very empty. Only desks, chalkboards and empty lockers. The school for advanced students is in a building a kilometer away. In the garden, the children from the gardening class plant their flowers. Neither they, nor anyone from the staff knows what flowers they are growing. We enter other classrooms, to find them as cold, and again with no signs of lessons being organised. ·It’s Monday,” the teachers say, ·most of the children are not back from visiting their families. That is why we unite classes and we use only a few classrooms, to save energy for heating”. We are shown to the bookcase with the textbooks and notebooks of all children. The bookcase is in the teachers’ room. They have textbooks for grades 7 and 8 as well as textbooks for beginners. We see the records for children’s attendance or absence. Only a few pages had been used since September 15 - the beginning of the school year - 25.10.2005, 11.11.2005, 07.12.2005, 20.12.2005. There was also a history lesson plan for a 7th grader. There were records for no more than 10 other students and different subjects. Outside, some of the children laughed at their friends who could not read and write. The children are 13-14 years old, and are at an advanced level. We were allowed to see the personal records of the children, to see if something had changed in the acceptance procedure. We saw protocols, signed and sealed by two teams, an internal one at the school and a team from the regional education inspectorate in Veliko Turnovo. From the records, we could not understand exactly who had done the examinations, or what the conclusions and recommendations were. The only things that were clear were the diagnoses - a slight or moderate developmental disability. And that the memory and intellect of a certain child were ·reduced” and the imagination ·limited”. The children, however, are very communicative. They speak to us about life in the school, what food they like and who their friends are. Their siblings are with them. Most of the children are of Romani origin and have never attended another type of school. They come from the surrounding Roma neighbourhoods and are embarrassed to tell us what they had learned. We spoke to the head of the school who said that the main goal of this special school was to teach the children hygiene habits and social skills. The headmaster said that the level of education at the school was not something to talk about. However, formally there had been individual plans for teaching
and education but they all had been filled out in the same way. One of the educators was happy to tell us that the school was to be repaired with money coming from a foundation, and the project had already been approved. Everyone hoped that the deputy headmaster, a former MP, would help the school. I ask myself if there is any kind of integration at all, and where the communication between two ministries is breaking down. These two ministries - the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy and the Ministry of Education - are responsible for the fate of 11,000 children with developmental disabilities. Who should start explaining the new law, regulations and instructions to the staff, and how? Why are they putting these questions to me, and why are they more willing to follow the recommendations of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, rather than those of their employers - mayors and ministers? How long is the road between the elaboration of a regulation and amendment of the Education Act, on the one hand, and its implementation on the other? Must the price of every change be the loss of jobs for employees and deprivation of the children from education so that people in this field would actually start reading and following the laws that set out their duties and responsibilities? How strong should the control for implementing a ministry instruction be? Why, when clerks in Sofia issue documents, do they not just for once think about whether they really work or not? How many children in Bulgaria have to remain illiterate and uncared for so that senior officials, teachers and educators put an end to their endless explanations and excuses that children with developmental disabilities ·cannot” be taught anything?
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