The same thing happens every autumn. While everyone's mouth is full of investments in schooling and education, the beginning of the new school year testifies to the beginning of a new struggle for students, parents and teachers. We can look at photos of smiling children's faces, which should testify to the solemnity of learning, but in the background are mostly nausea and headaches. For children, because of a bunch of unsolved problems in the education system, due to which the learning process turns into a process of torture. Only they know how the parents are doing. At the same time, the quality of what the system will try to put into the little heads is only one of the concerns.
The beginning of the new school year in Croatian society is a severe stress because after a relaxing summer, if it was relaxing considering the heat wave, comes the confrontation with a painful truth. It is true that the more and more common way of equipping children to go to school is to take non-purpose loans. It should be added that some of the parents' problems of a financial nature are the least of their worries. They literally worry about how their children will attend classes from the day one school year ends until the beginning of the new one. For them, that period of several months is a trauma. Which they have to hide from the children so as not to traumatize them with their completely justified fears. Fears that are the result of a misunderstanding of politics when it comes to creating equal educational conditions for all children. There is no doubt that the policy will claim that they are doing everything to ensure that all children have an equal opportunity when it comes to education. But the reality shows something completely different. The latter is cruel because the system improvises year after year when it comes to helping those who need it most in the educational process. These are children with developmental disabilities.
It has been going on for several months, during which it has been warned that there are bad legal solutions when it comes to teaching assistants and that the system could collapse. In translation, this means that without help there could be many who need help when it comes to attending teaching activities. Although the school year has officially started, there are still children with disabilities who do not have teaching assistants. With the fact that the working conditions for teaching assistants are such that no one should be surprised that people do not rush for this laudable job. It's no secret that in many schools, vacancies for teaching assistants are repeated because not enough candidates came forward. There is no doubt that it is very questionable whether, even after repeated tenders, teaching assistants will come forward, without which it is almost impossible for children with disabilities to attend classes. What this means for parents who are faced with this problem is hard to imagine. Instead of a smile because of the start of the new school year, they have a spasm on their face full of fear, pain and suffering.
Because those responsible for solving this problem year after year do not try to find a solution that will be long-term and thanks to which parents will not suffer months of agony from the end of one school year to the beginning of a new school year, during which teaching assistants remain without employment contracts. So they are forced to apply for tenders again. And that for miserable salaries of 600 to 800 euros, which are completely demotivating, regardless of the love for that job, without which there is no quality attendance for about 10.000 children in Croatia. More precisely, it would be impossible for most of them to attend classes. The example of Zagreb's Kajzerica elementary school, which is still looking for 14 teaching assistants, shows how it looks. This means that 14 Zagreb families whose children with disabilities go to that school do not sleep because of worry.
For them, Croatian society is not a society of equal opportunities, and it won't be until someone gets serious about solving this problem. Which is increasing year by year because the number of children who need help is increasing year by year. Instead of school founders, local and regional self-governments, and the relevant ministry finally hearing what teaching assistants and parents have to say in order to systematically solve this problem, they will refer to decrees and regulations that, if valid, would not generate an ever-increasing deficit candidate for that job. Croatia is not such a poor country that it could not find a solution. One of the solutions is not to disperse the forces on senseless and unnecessary ideas such as singing the national anthem at the beginning of school lessons. Parents are faced with real problems, and cultivating patriotic feelings is not part of those problems.
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