Desegregation

These research findings on the local level suggest a very loose connection between national documents and policies, on the one hand, and local concrete measures taken by the school staff or local authorities under the aegis of national or international initiatives in which Bulgaria takes part, on the other. One weak point of the governmental programmes aiming to improve the education of Roma is the lack of any elaborated mechanism for monitoring and evaluation. This structural weakness of governmental educational policies raises, in turn, serious questions about the efficiency of these programmes as well as about their potential for development and replication.

Delays in implementation after policy documents have been elaborated and disseminated risk further decreasing Government credibility in the field of education for Roma.

There were two programmes for dismantling segregation developed by the Bulgarian Government, both not implemented. First, in September 2003, the Government developed an Action Plan for the Implementation of the Framework Programme for the Equal Integration of Roma in Bulgarian Society for the Period 2003–2004.¹⁰⁷ It envisaged identifying integrated schools for the purposes of school desegregation by January 2004 and developing models for enrolling Roma students in them. The municipalities were obliged to ensure transport of Roma children where needed. None of these measures was implemented.

The second programme was developed in February 2005 on the eve of the opening of the Decade of Roma Inclusion; the Government’s Decade Action Plan has much in terms of desegregation, with many targets dealing specifically with it, from a legal and an implementation perspective. The Decade Action Plan targets physical desegregation of children from segregated geographical settings as well as actions for handling desegregation from special schools.¹⁰⁸ It envisaged the creation of a centre for the educational integration of children and students from ethnic minorities within the Ministry of Education and Science as a special governmental fund, supposed to finance projects for school desegregation. The plan envisaged 1,000,000 levs (€500,000) for 2005 as seed money. The plan also envisaged developing municipal programmes and plans with concrete schedules for closing segregated schools and pre-schools and ensuring the necessary transport. The plan, however, did not secure any funds for the implementation of these activities. A law for the establishment of this centre for the educational integration of children and students from ethnic minorities was rejected by Parliament in October 2004 already at the first reading. In response, the Government established it by a decree of the Council of Ministers in January 2005.¹⁰⁹ After a long delay, in May 2006 the Council of Ministers adopted the Rules and Regulations for the Structure, Activities and the Organisation of the Centre for the Educational Integration of Children and Students from Ethnic Minorities.¹¹⁰

Since 1999 three governments of Bulgaria have failed to deliver on their commitments to desegregate Roma education. Soon after the adoption of the Framework Programme for the Equal Integration of Roma in Bulgarian Society, several NGOs started

107 Government of Bulgaria, Action Plan for the Implementation of the Framework Programme for the Equal Integration of Roma in Bulgarian Society for the Period 2003–2004, September 2003, available at http://ethnos.bg/index.php?TPL=2&MID=89&SID=276 (accessed on 23 February 2007).

108 Decade Action Plan, targets 1.1.1 through 1.2. 4.

109 Council of Ministers, Decree No. 4 on the Establishment of a Centre for the Educational Integration of Children and Students from Ethnic Minorities, Official Gazette, No. 7, 19 January 2005.

110 Council of Ministers, Decree No. 108 from 8 May 2006 on the Adoption of the Rules and Regulations for the Structure, Activities and the Organisation of the Centre for Educational Integration of the Children and Students from Ethnic Minorities, Official Gazette, No. 40, 16 May 2006.

implementing desegregation projects funded by the OSI’s Roma Participation Programme and later by the Roma Education Fund. They enrol children from the Roma neighbourhoods in mainstream schools in eight Bulgarian cities: Vidin, Pleven, Montana, Stara Zagora, Sliven, Haskovo, Sofia and Plovdiv. More than 2,000 students successfully participated in these programmes during the 2004–2005 school year. In addition to organising their transport to the mainstream schools the projects ensure additional educational support and supervision of the Roma students, as well as extracurricular activities. The May 2005 evaluation of the projects showed that Roma students from integrated classes perform better at school even when they come from families with lower socio-economic status.¹¹¹

In one of these projects in the town of Vidin, as of April 2006, there were 633 Roma children (around 56 per cent of the students in Vidin Municipality). These children are transferred to the integrated mainstream schooling system with the support of the NGO Organisation Drom, which started desegregating the school in the Roma neighbourhood in 2000. Interviews with local authorities, school directors and NGO leaders indicate that the local measures for desegregation in Vidin are the sole responsibility of Organisation Drom, which involves all Vidin upper secondary schools as partners. The rest of the students in the municipality still study in segregated schools or classes.¹¹²

Close observation of several schools in Vidin Municipality showed that the school infrastructure (running water, indoor toilets and central heating) and school facilities (sport halls, equipped laboratories and libraries) are much better in the mainstream schools than those in the segregated schools, despite the fact that all schools receive subsidies according to the same criteria (see Annex 2).

In addition, a new Resource Centre for children with special educational needs was registered in the Regional Court of Vidin on 20 September 2006. Based in Vidin, it was created and is funded by the Ministry of Education and Science. The director of this new centre explained that the role of this new State agency will be to work for the integration of children with special needs and Roma pupils within the mainstream school environment in the Vidin region.¹¹³ The centre claims that there are 36 children with special educational needs, of whom 27 have intellectual disabilities, who were registered by the centre as being able to study in mainstream schools for the 2006–

2007 school year. None of these children, however, came from the special school.

Other localities, where there are no NGO-led desegregation efforts, have been slow to take action against segregation. The Regional Inspectorate of Education in Veliko Turnovo lists the P. R. Slaveykov Primary School in Pavlikeni as the only segregated school in the district. For several years discussions have been ongoing between the

111 BHC, Five Years Later.

112 Case study Vidin.

113 Interview with Asia Petrova, director of the Resource Centre, Vidin, 27 September 2006, Vidin.

Regional Inspectorate of Education, Pavlikeni Municipality, the segregated school and the Bulgarian-majority school in close proximity to it for merging the two schools.

However, no activities have been undertaken for changing the ratio between minority and majority children in the Hristo Botev School in Veliko Turnovo, which for 2005–

2006 is 75.6 per cent Roma, or for addressing several Roma-majority schools in the district’s villages.¹¹⁴

A successful practice has been established in Gorna Oriahovitza, a neighbouring municipality. In 2003 the primary school in the Roma neighbourhood was closed after a series of discussions with the NGO, the Amalipe Centre for Interethnic Dialogue and Tolerance, and all the children integrated into a predominantly Bulgarian school near the neighbourhood. At the beginning the Roma parents were reluctant to let their children study outside the neighbourhood, all the more so as they had to travel via a railway station. To overcome this difficulty, the school director has provided daily transport for 97 students from the Roma neighbourhood.¹¹⁵ Subsequently, the municipality assumed the responsibility for providing the transport of the children to the St. Paisij Hilendarski Primary School, which is approximately 1.5–2 kilometres from the settlement.

In addition to initiatives aimed at desegregation on an ethnic basis, in September 2003 the Council of Ministers adopted a plan for reducing the number of children in specialised institutions.¹¹⁶ According to the National Plan for the Integration of Children with Special Educational Needs and/or Chronic Diseases in the National Education System,¹¹⁷ the first goal of the plan is “inclusion of children with special educational needs without regard to the degree of disability into the educational process in all types of schools and pre-schools”.

The 2005 report of the State Agency for Child Protection (SACP) on the right to education for children with special educational needs, however, estimates that this process is slow. For the entire year 2004, only 341 children were integrated in the mainstream schools, of whom fewer than one third were integrated due to the recommendations of diagnostic teams.¹¹⁸ The SACP has criticised the reluctance of the

114 Case study Veliko Turnovo.

115 Case study Veliko Turnovo.

116 Council of Ministers, Decision No. 602 from 2 September 2003, published in Newsletter of the SACP, No. 1/2005.

117 The Plan is envisaged by the National Education Act, Националенпланзаинтегриранена деца със специални образователни потребности и/или с хронични заболявания в систематананароднатапросвета (The National Plan for the Integration of Children with Special Educational Needs and/or Chronic Diseases in the National Education System), adopted by the Council of Ministers on the recommendation of the Ministry of Education and Science.

The last version is available on the MES website at

http://www.minedu.government.bg/opencms/export/sites/mon/left_menu/documents/strategies/

plan_spec_potrebnosti.pdf (accessed on 20 February 2007).

118 SACP, “Right to Education for Children with Special Educational Needs,” p. 41.

diagnostic teams to direct children from special schools to mainstream schools, but does not reveal that a conflict of interest may give the teams an incentive to keep children in special schools. Teachers from the special schools are members of the diagnostic teams. However, as their jobs depend on maintaining enrolment in the special schools, they may possibly have a motive for ensuring that students continue to be placed in such schools.

Besides the desegregation projects mentioned above, the Roma Education Fund is financing several other efforts. Those projects that particularly deal with desegregation are extensive, and can be found on the Roma Education Fund website.¹¹⁹ Many of them deal with the physical transfer of children from segregated geographical locations into integrated ones, with supports to integrating schools, while others focus on assisting municipalities to adopt concrete plans of action for implementing desegregation. These projects are seemingly in alignment with the objectives of the Decade Action Plan. However, most are implemented by NGOs, and their relationship to national efforts is not clear. As of October 2006, approximately 15 projects had been funded that target desegregation.

While Bulgaria has taken concrete steps towards reducing segregation, the process is slow and progress is halting. The lack of a clear vision and concrete instruments for implementation, including securing governmental financial resources, impedes it.

There are no concrete monitoring instruments to assess longer-term success rates, or to ensure that a process of resegregation does not take hold.