The parents of the 18 pupils at the school threatened to move their children if the refugee children arrived at the school, local media said.
Of the 12 foreign children, seven are first-graders and the rest in other grades.
Bulgarian institutions are insisting that the refugee children should attend school. Earlier in September, there were reports that bureaucratic obstacles were obstructing the admission of refugee children to schools in Bulgaria.
Speaking on September 15 to television station bTV, Kovatchevitsa mayor Vassil Stanimirov said that he had been alerted at the last minute that the school in Kalishte should accept refugees.
He alleged that he was threatened that if the refugee children were not admitted to the school, buses to the school would be stopped and there would be financial penalties.
According to Stanimirov, “the problem is that these are not refugees. They are foreigners who sought protected status who have been refused it – Somalis and Afghans”.
The villagers were reportedly unhappy that the children “did not know Bulgarian”. The school’s headmistress, Violeta Mihailova, said that she would comply with the order, but the teachers were not prepared to teach children who had not passed a course in the Bulgarian language.
- However, Lazar Dodev of the Ministry of Education said that it was not true that the children did not speak Bulgarian. They had completed a six-month course in the language, he said.
Anna Andreeva of Bulgaria’s State Agency for Refugees said that the presence of the children in the school would help prevent it being closed down.
- “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Andreeva said. She said that it worried her that in a small village where there were so few pupils, people did not want refugee children admitted to the school.
Local media said that a special meeting of the Kovatchevitsa municipal council was being called to discuss the situation.
http://sofiaglobe.com/2014/09/15/bulgarian-village-residents-protest-against-accepting-refugee-children-in-school/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bulgarian-village-residents-protest-against-accepting-refugee-children-in-school
15/9/14
--
-
Related:
GR
FR
DE
ES
IT
RU
EU
Bulgarian village continues ‘war’ over refugee children – but denies racism ....
ReplyDeleteA group of refugee children from Somalia and Afghanistan may end up going to school in Sofia after residents of the Bulgarian village of Kalishte in the Kovachevitsa area campaigned against the children being admitted to the local school.
On September 15, the first day of the Bulgarian school year, a special meeting of the Kovachevitsa municipal council issued an “ultimatum” for the Somali and Afghan families to leave the national children’s ecological complex in the town by October 30.
At the complex, 82 men, 79 women and 105 children are being housed.
Residents of Kalishte rallied against admitting the children to the village school, arguing that the immigrants would infect them with “lice, worms and chicken pox.”
The controversy in Kalishte has made headlines in several national media in Bulgaria, which saw a significant increase in the number of refugees arriving in 2013, and which is heading to early parliamentary elections on October 5.
Kovachevitsa mayor Vassil Stanimirov denied that there was racism in the decision by the municipal council to call on the refugees to leave.
Both he and the headmaster of the school were informed only on September 12 that the 12 children from Somalia and Afghanistan would be brought to the Kalishte village school.
Stanimirov asked how the immigrant children, whom he said did not know Bulgarian, would learn alongside the Bulgarian children at the school.
He said that there had been a case of malaria at the camp, but the local authorities had learnt about this only from the media after a one-month quarantine at the camp had expired, during which time residents of the camp had been walking around in the village.
Parents were concerned that there was no clear communication between the State Agency for Refugees and the local authorities, according to Stanimirov.
“Why should our children suffer? What integration will there be when there will be two local pupils and seven little Somalis in the class who do not speak Bulgarian?”
However, for all the claims that the children from the camp did not speak Bulgarian, at least those who were interviewed by television reporters gave their interviews speaking Bulgarian....................- See more at: http://www.balkaneu.com/bulgarian-village-continues-war-refugee-children-denies-racism/#sthash.GW7t5spx.dpuf
16/9/14