Language

of the child”.²⁷⁴ After completing the eighth grade the child receives a certificate and not a diploma. The children in the special school are assessed at the beginning of each school year, and there is, at least in theory, an individual programme for the development of each child, which is reassessed at the end of the first school term. In practice, however, this is rarely the case.

The Juvenile Delinquency Act regulates placement of children in special schools for children with behavioural challenges.²⁷⁵ Established during the period of Communism, the placement procedure for these schools was completely arbitrary for years and was a matter of serious concern for local and international human rights monitors.²⁷⁶ This procedure was reformed in July 2004 – placement became possible only through a court decision with some, although not all, due process guarantees. The new procedure did contribute to the reduction of the number of children in this type of special schools.²⁷⁷ However, it is still entrapped by the deficiencies of both the Bulgarian criminal justice system and the education system, with selective targeting of Roma juveniles as delinquents, and children from poor families being used as material to maintain the capacity of institutions serving their own institutional logic, just as in the case of the special schools.

Development of School Education and Pre-School Upbringing and Instruction.²⁷⁸ According to the IMIR 2003 survey, around 74 per cent of Christian Roma children and around 90 per cent of Muslim Roma children in Bulgaria speak a minority language (Romanes or Turkish) at home. Also, around 70 per cent of Christian Roma children and 87 per cent of Muslim Roma children speak a minority language with friends.²⁷⁹ There is clear evidence from this survey that speaking Bulgarian at home correlates positively with higher grades at school in both the Turkish community and the Roma community. However, Turkish children (a separate object of study of the IMIR survey) report higher grades at school, despite the fact that they speak a minority language at home and with friends much more often than Christian Roma and as often as Muslim Roma. Yet 60.7 per cent of the Muslim Roma children and 50.3 per cent of the Christian Roma children report that they need additional education in Bulgarian language.²⁸⁰ Another study reports that more than two thirds of the children in the Roma and in the Turkish communities start the school with no knowledge of the Bulgarian language.²⁸¹

There is no precise information on how many educators working in pre-schools or in schools with a high percentage of Roma speak Romanes or Turkish and are prepared to teach or conduct some instruction in these languages using bilingual techniques. The overwhelming majority of the teachers in these schools are Bulgarians who do not speak any Romanes or Turkish. They are unable to use bilingual techniques and do not understand the specific educational needs of Roma children. This is also true for the teachers in integrated schools.²⁸² Yet clearly there are some teachers who speak Romanes or Turkish, as all the teachers who taught Romanes at the height of its popularity in the mid-1990s were themselves Roma. According to information from the Regional Inspectorates of Education for the 2004–2005 school year, 11 teachers identified themselves as Roma and as Romanes-speakers.²⁸³ Their number, however, is probably higher in fact.

Research in Vidin suggests that the level of Bulgarian language proficiency of Roma children in pre-school and before entering the first grade at school is very limited, because they live in segregated Roma settlements, where Romanes is dominant, and

278 National Programme for the Development of School Education and Pre-School Upbringing and Instruction, IV.3.

279 IMIR, Final Report on Minority Education, pp. 17–18. See also the entry on the Roma neighbourhood of Stolipinovo, in Plovdiv, indicating the gravity of the problem and the tendency to have fewer Roma Bulgarian-speakers among the younger generation.

280 IMIR, Final Report on Minority Education, p. 18.

281 Tomova, “Education of Vulnerable Minority Communities,” p. 197.

282 Hristo Kyuchukov and A. Ivanova, “Отношението на учителите към образованието на ромските деца” (The Attitude of Teachers to the Education of Roma Children), in Kyuchukov (ed.), Desegregation or Inter-Cultural Integration, p. 187.

283 Interview with Yosif Nunev, State expert at the Ministry of Education and Science, 23 March 2006.

they communicate at home solely in this language.²⁸⁴ The practice of Organisation Drom shows that once Roma children enter integrated schools they quickly adapt to the language environment if they are tutored after the regular classes. The Vidin desegregation model has shown that this is a much better practice instead of channelling resources for assistant teachers to enter integrated classes and translate for the Roma children. According to a member of the committee that decides for the placement of children in special schools, there are misdiagnoses of Roma in special schools because they do not speak Bulgarian well, but the Roma parents, usually of a poor social background, insist that their children go to this type of school because of the substantial benefits offered by the State.²⁸⁵

In Veliko Turnovo Municipality, however, poor command of Bulgarian is only rarely the reason for misdiagnosis of Roma in the special schools. Most of the Roma children in the municipality are Turkish-speakers. There is a serious problem for the children from the Sveta Gora neighbourhood in Veliko Turnovo, since many of them do not attend pre-school prior to first-grade school enrolment. A pre-school group has been established in the Hristo Botev School in Veliko Turnovo for children with low proficiency in Bulgarian and/or Turkish as their mother tongue. At the same time, the school has eight groups for studying Turkish as a mother tongue as a free elective subject. Some of the teachers speak Turkish. Observations of teachers teaching in the secondary schools in the town show that children coming from the Hristo Botev School drop behind in the school material due to their low command of Bulgarian.²⁸⁶ There are no schools in Veliko Turnovo where Romanes is taught as a mother tongue. In the neighbouring Gorna Oriahovitza Municipality, students specialising in primary school pedagogy with Romanes language have their practice in teaching Romanes within the Roma folklore classes. The primary teacher teaching Roma folklore in the school of Vodoley has reported that she uses the mother tongue of the children (which is a mixture of Romanes and Turkish) to facilitate her everyday work with the children.²⁸⁷

Likewise, both Roma community representatives and schoolteachers and principals report that Roma children in Nikolaevo face serious language difficulties, especially those who have not attended pre-school.²⁸⁸ The problems are greatest in the first school grade, and sometimes the communication necessitates interpretation by a person who speaks the mother tongue of the children. None of the teachers speaks Turkish, which appears to be the mother tongue of most of the Roma children.²⁸⁹

284 Case study Vidin.

285 Anonymous interview with a committee member, 23 April 2006, Vidin.

286 Case study Veliko Turnovo.

287 Case study Veliko Turnovo.

288 Interviews with Biliana Belcheva, school principal, Ivan Minchev, informal Roma leader, Ivan Jorov, teaching assistant, and Tania Kostadinova (Nikolaevo Municipality), October 2006.

289 Case study Nikolaevo.

A number of experts have noted the importance of studying Romanes as a mother tongue, in terms of building children’s self-esteem and personal identity. The lack of an overarching Government policy on the study of second languages has been cited as a problem in establishing a comprehensive system to enable children to study their mother tongue in school.²⁹⁰

290 OSI Roundtable, Sofia, June 2006.