School is starting, every one for themselves!

The Minister of Education yesterday announced that there have been schools that have requested at the last minute the change of the scenario for the beginning of the school year. As a result, the Emergency Situations Inspectorate of Bucharest has gathered to decide on revising the scenarios.

The official said that special situations have appeared in the Central School and the "Zâna Florilor" Kindergarten of Bucharest.

The minister said, yesterday morning, that the situation is indeed dynamic, and suggested that changes can happen at any time that would require quick intervention from the authorities, but he added that "parents need to be confident".

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Children have announced protests for tomorrow, at 11:00, in front of the Ministry of Education.

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• Funds transferred for the beginning of the school

TransferGo, an international online money transfer company, has announced that it has increased by 25% the number of money transfers, as well as the amounts, between Romanians living abroad and those in Romania, due to the beginning of the new school year. Moreover, in order to ensure that children's needs are met, parents working abroad are sending money even 2-3 times a month. The median price of a fully equipped schoolbag is about 100 lei, on top of every other expense needed for beginning school, such as clothing, transportation, or auxiliary school materials. Moreover, together with the new regulations imposed because of the pandemic, some of the classes have been moved online, so that means that many pupils have to buy a laptop or another smart device, to allow them to attend the online classes.

According to the Ministry of National Education, in 2019, over 160,000 children in Romania were in the care of grandparents or other relatives, while their parents were working abroad. Also at this time of year, the number of money transfers through the TransferGo application increases in the opposite direction, from Romania to the young Romanians who went abroad to study. According to UNESCO data, in 2018, more than 38,000 Romanian students were studying abroad. In 2019, the Minister of Romanians from Everywhere estimated that the number of Romanians in the diaspora amounted to 5.6 million Romanians, out of a total of 9.7 million Romanians abroad, the difference being the result of the historical / traditional communities in Romania's neighboring countries.

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• Optimism - the dates of the National Evaluation have been set

Online or offline, the school year has to end, and pupils at the end of their school cycle must take their national exams. The schedule for the National Evaluation of 8th grade pupils in the 2020 - 2021 school year has been published in the Official Gazette.

The schedule is comprised in the order of the Ministry of Education and Research concerning the organization and execution of the National Evaluation for the 2020 - 2021 school year. According to the order, registration will take place between June 7 - June 11 2021. Starting on June 22, 2021 the written tests begin, and the final results will be made public on July 4, 2021. According to the order, teachers and the auxiliary staff who have relatives taking the tests will not be allowed inside the schools - examination/evaluation/dispute centers during the period of examination. Teachers nominated as evaluating professors are usually picked from among those who are part of the Body of Evaluator Teachers for the national exams and competitions. The teachers who are part of the commissions from the zonal evaluation center will be picked by the county commissions/ the Commission of Bucharest for the organization of the National Evaluation via a random draw. The draw is held in a public meeting, which can also be organized in the form of a videoconference system. The order also shows that during the dispute resolution stage, once the evaluation of the works ends, the grades awarded after the reevaluation are compared to those from the initial evaluation. If a difference of more than one point is found, between the initial grade and the one awarded after the reevaluation, a new dispute commission will be appointed consisting of two experienced teachers. The reevaluation is made after the tests are once again anonymized, and the grade awarded by the second commission will be the final one. Just like this year, the communication of the results obtained in the exam will be done anonymously, using the individual codes that replace the name and surname of the candidate and which will be distributed to the students, based on their signature, upon their first test.

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• Salvaţii Copiii (Save the Children) making donations

Salvaţi Copiii is urgently allocating funds for children who are at risk of school exclusion, because they do not have a laptop or a tablet, and they are starting school in a red or yellow scenario.

The organization is making a public appeal, for children who find themselves in this grave situation to be able to exercise their universal right to education by September 14. Gabriela Alexandrescu, Executive president of Salvaţi Copiii România, said: "It is an emergency situation, there a few thousand children who will be placed in a critical situation of inability to participate in education, because they have no way to access the online classes. It is unacceptable that this has happened and that vulnerable children are being sacrificed, but it is imperative that we first identify a solution and then work on a long-term plan that no longer allows for such situations. We are calling for solidarity, we need at least 4,500 tablets with internet access. Save the Children teams are in the field, collecting data and ensuring that the support reaches the beneficiaries directly. "So far, Save the Children has managed to mobilize funding mechanisms to equip 3,000 children with tablets in order to allow them to participate in online courses. "The impact of Covid-19 on children in Romania" study conducted by Save the Children Romania shows that almost half of children in our country do not have access to a tablet or a computer, the only devices that can allow real participation in online classes.

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• Red tape and medicine

The National Society of Family Medicine (SNMF) has found out with surprise about the statements making the rounds in the public sphere concerning the need for the issuing epidemiological and athletic certificates by every family doctor for every child that begins school on September 14, 2020. Such requests exceed the legislation in effect and not only do they demonstrate ignorance of the legislation by those who encourage the issuing of these documents, but also reflect the ignorance of the risk that parents and children are pointlessly exposed to.

Norms concerning the set of documents that are needed and the moment of the release of these documents are explicitly stated in Appendix 3 to the order of the Minister of Education and Minister of Healthcare 5289/1668/2011 as well as in notification no. 1329/September 08, 2020 sent by the Minister of Healthcare to the county public health departments and to the Public Health Department of Bucharest. These medical acts that would certify the children's state of health will only be released upon registration/transfer/end of the education cycle and include the medical certificate (appendix 1), and epidemiological certificate (appendix 2). According to the provisions of appendix 3 of the Order no. 5298/2011, the epidemiological certificate is only issued under the following circumstances: a) after a period of absence from the collective of at least 3 consecutive days; b) upon departure from camps, study visits etc. SNMF mentions that it necessary to make the distinction between the epidemiological certificate that has a limited validity duration, especially in the context of the pandemic, and the medical certificate for registration in the collective, which is necessary only upon registering for a form of education (kindergarten, 1st class, 4th class, 5th class and 9th class) and is released on the date of the general examination precisely to prevent the crowding of the family medicine practices in the beginning of the year. The athletic certificate requested from the family doctor is not a document that is required in order to take the physical education and sports classes. Requesting each of the aforementioned documents in the beginning of every year also represents an abusive action of the schools. According to the SNMF: "Forcing nearly 4000000 children (according to data from the INS) and their parents, during a pandemic, in order to get within a few days documents that are of no use to anybody, which are not legally required and serve no other purpose than to give the directors of the schools the comfort of the stack of papers rigorously archived shows a lack of respect towards parents and children and maybe a degree of cynicism and mistaken perception of reality".

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At the end of last week, the leadership of the Parents' Alliance in Romania has called upon parents to urgently send a request signed on their own behalf to the Ministry of Education.

The text of the letter is the following:

"To Minister Monica Anisie

Ministry of Education and Research

Dear Minister,

As parents concerned by the measures considered by the Ministry of Education, we hereby ask you the following:

1. Wearing the mask in school needs to have an optional nature. This request is motivated by the fact that all scientific data so far show a very low incidence of grave or fatal cases of Covid-19 among children, and «their return to school does not expose children to a direct danger» (Prof. Malcom Semple-British Medical Journal). There are many children who have various forms of skin or respiratory allergies that will be worsened by wearing a mask. Moreover, the mask muffles the speech. Children sitting in the back of the class won't hear or understand what teachers are saying;

2. Plexiglas separators must be removed. It is unacceptable, especially for a young child, not to be able to know his new classmates, not to be able to know and recognize their teacher, to feel alone among strangers, isolated in a cage they are not allowed to leave. Under such conditions, school would become a hostile environment where children would come with fear, and the pleasure of learning would be non-existent;

3. Thermoscanning, regardless of the method used, may only be conducted by the doctor of the school's medical office and only with the written consent of a parent;

4 Social distancing between students has to be of about 1 meter, and schools have to be able to establish independently their number of daily shifts, the duration of the classes and the space needed for the implementation of this recommendation.

Nevertheless it has to be remembered that students in the early classes absolutely need the physical presence of a teacher in order to learn how to write;

5. The hand sanitizer has to be approved by a medical authority;

6. In the event of the appearance of symptoms such as sneezing, fever, coughing, breathing problems, while a child (of any age) is at school, the management of the school will notify the parents/guardians, who, following the advice of the school doctor, will decide the adequate behavior, according with Law 136/2020 concerning the introduction of public health measures under situations of epidemiological and biological risk;

7. In special education, wearing a mask and social distancing will be excluded. The measures predicted by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Healthcare are completely ignoring the 50,000 children included in special education, of the 70,000 handicapped children in Romania. In the annual report concerning the state of pre-university education of Romania, special education, for pre-school, primary and gymnasium levels, for all types and degrees of handicaps, only gets 5 to 7 lines. The three scenarious of the Ministry of Education don't even grant them that.

Children with special needs (deaf-mute, blind, children with neuromotoric handicap, Down syndrome, or even retardation of various degrees and causes) may not be imposed rules that they wouldn't understand and which they would not be able to abide by. Those rules would deprive them precisely of the factors meant to help them develop environmental, emotional, cognitive orientation and the ability to relate.

Schools for the blind absolutely require the tactile presence of the teacher in order to learn reading and writing in Braille, to be taught orientation and to be able to acquire the skills they need for survival.

Classes for the deaf and hard-of-hearing cannot take place with masks, because they need to see the lips moving in order to learn lip-reading and the mechanic of speech. The inability to see the expression of the interlocutor causes among children feelings of anxiety, insecurity, alienation, distrust, emotional instability. All the more so for those with special needs.

8. In vocational education, (arts, music, choreography, drama, etc.) wearing a mask and social distancing will be excluded because these requirements make the teaching process impossible.

The measures above are the ones that are currently applied in Great Britain, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Georgia, Hungary and in many states within the United States of America".

Thanks in advance.