The Center for Civic Education (CEO) assessed that the questionnaire on the basic data of male and female students, which was distributed in some elementary schools, such as Elementary School "Štampar Makarije" and Elementary School "Radojica Perović", represents illegal data collection.
"That practice needs to be stopped urgently, but responsibility for its initiation must also be established. Namely, when enrolling children in school, students were given questionnaires that refer to a series of personal data related to their family. Those questionnaires could not be distributed without the consent of the Ministry of Education, which chose to remain silent on this issue instead of explaining to the public how this situation could have come about and sanctioning those responsible. CGO underlines that this is an unacceptable and potentially dangerous questionnaire, because it asks for data that can cause divisions and discriminatory attitudes of teaching and management staff towards students and their parents," the NGO said in a statement.
CGO states that inMale and female students should be the focus of schools, "that is, their upbringing and education must be the priority of the teaching and management staff in schools, regardless of the families they come from because they are equal before the law."
"Therefore, there is no need for the school to create individual files for them with data related to family members. It should be emphasized that this questionnaire contains a number of questions that can be considered secret data. There is no mention in it that parents, that is, guardians of children, are not obliged to answer those questions that they consider personal and secret information and to which absolutely no one has the right. On the contrary, they are asked to fill in every column for both father and mother! Furthermore, the question arises as to the real purpose of this questionnaire, because the school already has most of this data due to the fact that the child is enrolled in it. However, personal questions such as: "is the family a beneficiary of the family's material security", "is there any health problem in the child's family", as well as the question of the family's housing conditions, should not be of interest to the school administration in any way. CGO expresses the hope that this questionnaire is not part of electoral engineering in which the data should be used to try to influence the way parents will vote. Finally, this is one more piece of evidence that school principals have overly broad powers that are often abused. The CGE has previously indicated that the method of selecting and appointing directors by the minister is not a good approach nor does it contribute to the establishment of democratic principles in schools. A special question is how well the parents' council and school boards were informed about this questionnaire and how they behaved according to the same document," concludes the CGO.
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