Vladimir Voronin: Residential schools are like prison to children

While they give a lot of headaches to the state, residential schools are just like prison to children, President Vladimir Voronin stated during a meeting of the Ministry of Social Protection, Family & Child. In his words, when they turn 18, the graduates of the residential schools find it hard to fit into the community, are not used to go shopping, cannot open a fridge and ignite a gas stove. The President labelled them “artificial people”, adding that the Government must come up with proposals to create family-type homes, which would raise no more than 10 children. “If there are too many children, some of the parents make a business out of it, while the others claim land and the only thing the poor children would see then is hoeing all day long”, the President said. The parents must be selected on competition basis, while the allowances for taking care of children in family-type homes must be substantially raised. At present, raising a child in a residential school costs the state budget some 40 thousand lei a year, the head of state specified. Besides the issue of residential schools versus family-type institutions, the meeting also addressed the Child Protection Information System. Our country doesn’t have a single system that would cover all the children enjoying social protection, said Viorica Dumbraveanu, head of the Ministry’s social and family protection department. Information about children, except for recipients of social care services, is recorded on paper, without being properly systematised and updated, which slows down the informational flow between specialists, institutions and authorities, Dumbraveanu explained. By the end of the year, the System will contain data on the children from the 6 pilot-regions selected by the UNICEF-EU/Tacis project “Development of Integrated Social Care Services for Vulnerable Families and Children at risk in Moldova”. Starting 2008, the computerised database will be updated and will cover step by step all the children placed in residential institutions and beneficiaries of social care services. This means that every child will have a file that will include identification data, health condition, school status, and legal status. The database will contain individual intervention plans for every child and the final objective of the intervention: reintegration into his/her biological family, placement under guardianship, placement in family-type institutions or adoption.