Back to School

More than 3 million kids Monday filled Romania's kindergartens, schools and high schools. The new school year has started, and, as it happens every year, it comes with both good and bad news.

There are schools which, according to principals and parents, are state-of-the-art, that is, just refurbished, with paintings on the walls, new furniture and new blackboards.

At the opposite pole, there are desolate schools, where construction works never seem to end, and children are packed together in classrooms that have not been upgraded in decades.

There are also schools that failed to meet the sanitary standards for operation in the 3rd millennium, either because their buildings are obsolete, or because they lack healthcare staff although they have advertised the respective vacancies.

One in five education institutions in Romania, particularly in rural communities, has failed to get the authorization to operate in the 2015-2016 school year.

Asked by a television station how he would rate the preparations for the new academic year, the Education Minister Sorin Cimpeanu said "somewhere between 8 and 9".

"On a scale of 1 to 10, I would say the quality of these preparations is somewhere between 8 and 9. We had a long conference call with all the county school inspectorates, we discussed the infrastructure level, the availability of textbooks, of teaching staff, all the key issues these days, and on this basis I reached the conclusion that our schools deserve an 8 to 9 grade", Sorin Cimpeanu said.

The current school year is 175 days long, organized into 2 semesters. According to the changes recently operated by the Education Ministry, the winter break will be one week longer than in previous years, it begins on December 19 and ends on January 10th.

On the other hand, the summer holiday starts one week later than usual, namely on June 24th. Little before school began, the Government decided that the nearly 362,000 students in the last high school year may get up to 12 euros in refunds for textbook expenses.

Other novelties have to do with the organization of national exams and high school admission.

Last, but not least, teachers hope that, for the first time in many years, the Government would raise their salaries, which, everybody admits, are very low.

A decision regarding possible future protests in the public education sector depends on what the Government chooses to do about it.