The Coalition “Voice of the Roma” insists that all the children, including those of the Roma ethnicity, should enjoy high-quality education. Ion Duminica, a member of the Coalition’s Secretariat, in a news conference at IPN, said the Roma students’ right to education has been violated again after online education was reintroduced.
According to Ion Duminică, this decision creates a problem related not only to the present, but also to the future as these children, not having access to studies, will become vulnerable citizens and will be unable to incorporate into the labor market. “The access to online education is now ensured only for a category of citizens, those who have a stable source of income. It means online education is for the rich. For the poor, the Roma community, the online education is not welcome and is not accepted. The students cannot accept it,” stated Ion Duminica.
If the authorities do not have solutions to ensure all the children’s access to high-quality of education, the vacation should be extended for all students. “We want all the children in the Republic of Moldova, including the Roma ones, to have equal access to high-quality education, in decent conditions. The online education does not envision equal access for all the children. We want the children to study at school, in a friendly, socialization environment. We do not want our children to be separated, discriminated and forgotten as online education creates new barriers, frontiers between the Roma children and the rest of society,” stated Ion Duminica.
The Coalition “Voice of the Roma” asks the authorities, before ordering online education, to make sure that all the localities have Internet collection, while the students and teachers have the necessary equipment and digital skills. “At this moment, online education is only a formal attribute that is not accessible to most of the children in the Republic of Moldova, including for those of the Roma ethnicity. We ask that from next week, March 15 (after the students’ vacation), education should be resumed in normal conditions,” noted Ion Duminica.
Valeriu Matac, community mediator in Centru district of Chisinau, said that this way most of the Roma children graduate from secondary schools only with an audience certificate. Without high-quality education, they do not have chances to find a job.
The conference forms part of the series of conferences held in the framework of IPN’s project “Exposing Injustice through Multimedia”. IPN Agency does not assume the right to decide if the organizers of news conferences are right in the cases about which they will speak as this is the exclusive prerogative of justice, but the exaggeratedly long examination period of these cases, which is much longer than the law allows, can be considered an act of evident unfairness and injustice. IPN News Agency does not bear responsibility for the public statements made in the public sphere by the organizers of news conferences.
