On Tuesday, May 9, the Ministry of Education of Sarajevo Canton (MO KS) sent information to all elementary and secondary schools, as a supplement to the "recommendations for working with students and parents of students after a crisis, a tragic event in neighboring Serbia", which addresses sent on May 4. In this amendment, schools are recommended how to proceed "in the event that a student expresses views or threatens to take his own life and/or endanger other people in some way".
In a one-page letter signed by Ezudin Kurtović, on the authority of the minister, schools are recommended/instructed that anyone in the school who hears or learns that a student threatens to hurt himself or others, immediately informs the school director, and the school director calls the parents of the student who threatened himself and others and the competent police department. The letter does not recommend talking to the parents, it is not known exactly what the role of the police department is, but such a student is immediately sent for a psychiatric examination at the Clinic for Psychiatry, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of the University Clinical Center in Sarajevo (KCUS or UKCS). The school has an obligation (recommendation turned into an obligation) to write a recommendation for examination with a description of the behavior, as well as the reason why the student is being referred for examination. After the examination, the parents inform the school about the psychiatrist's recommendations. If the psychiatrist assesses that there is no need for intervention at the clinic, the school psychologist works with the child, and the Center for Mental Health is also notified. If the parents refuse to take the child to a psychiatrist, the school informs the Center for Social Work. What the centers for social work do - whether they persuade parents or call the police to help them - is not known. Finally, the school must also inform the Ministry.
The dry, squeezed information (recommendations, obligations, orders) hides the removal of the responsibility of the competent Ministry from possible potential tragic events and everything is transferred to the schools, so that they deal with the parents and the Clinic and the police and the centers for social work and mental health - in translation: let the school also write memos and have all recorded steps in the archive if, God forbid, it is needed for social conscience washing after a potential tragedy. Let's not get into other regulations - from where does the school send a referral to the Clinic - this information is superfluous for schools. Even in the existing regulations (which this letter bypasses and ignores), the indicators for identifying students at risk are clearly stated and when, with the assessment of the school pedagogue and psychologist that they cannot provide full support at school, the child, in agreement with the parents, is referred to other competent institutions.
Here, let's imagine a few situations that this memo covers - a student says that he heard another student say that he was going to hurt himself. The information reaches the school director; the principal calls the parents and the police; referral to psychiatry. Basically, there is no room for the school service to talk to the students and determine whether someone really said it, when they said it, in what context, whether someone misunderstood... Or: someone else, using someone else's profile on social networks, writes that will hurt himself or others; again the same unnecessary procedure with the wrong person.
The problem is much more complex - children do not always say what they intend to do, schools do not always notice that the child needs professional help. The school, which is set up to deliver information, orally or in writing, checks whether the students have absorbed it and the teachers evaluate them for that - there is not much time or space to deal with what the children are experiencing. The school is an institution that still celebrates spartan discipline, especially in the older grades of elementary and high school, and still avoids taboo subjects in slavery to conservative requirements. In a school set up like that, different extreme reactions are indeed possible, because it offers a solid framework for the adoption of violent behavior, for repressed feelings, because it sends a very clear message that mistakes are punished.
This letter actually reflects the true attitude of the competent educational authorities towards the real problems in the education system - bureaucratic exclusion from responsibility and instant reaction to the consequences; prevention, radical change, serious research on children's lives do not exist. The needs of the schools are also reduced to the same plane - the same for everyone regardless of the needs, because there is no time to look for the specifics of each school. Letter to letter, response to requested information, survey of children, parents and employees without feedback and visible purpose, numbers of observed students, numbers of students with reduced abilities; statistics of indifference emanate from the education system. Bureaucracy that never ends. If it were different - after the tragedy in the Belgrade school, we would start talking about why this kind of school, what we can change, how to make school not a necessary obligation, to see the meaning in what is taught, what is being worked on, that almost all teachers be among the first people to whom children will talk about their problems, wishes, fears, and joys.
It is clear that unexpected tragic events cause panic reactions, as defense mechanisms that prevent responsibility in advance. However, this information, as a supplement to earlier recommendations, should not only have been differently intoned (not to talk about children as some kind of objects), but it had to take the child into account, enable school professionals to assess for themselves when and in which cases the help of a psychiatrist is requested . The letter could, after consultation with the employees of the Clinic for Psychiatry, foresee the arrival of a psychiatrist to the school if such a request comes from the school. This memo could have emphasized the caution in stigmatization and could have very clearly emphasized that this is a short interview measure before more serious discussions by experts on how to act in different situations after a more serious analysis of what occupies children's lives. After we open the topic of quality education and try to agree on what kind of school would be good for the children. Bureaucrats from ministerial offices do not know this and do not want to; they continue to trade the best interest of every child for the bureaucratic abdication of responsibility for what schools are today.
The author is a professor of the literature of the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Bosnian language; he is the director of "Safvet-beg Bašagić" Elementary School, Sarajevo; currently leads educational reforms in the Una-Sana Canton
Bonus video:
