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The ordinance cutting government's public spending, mainly the part related to the abolition of public bodies with less than 50 employees, would affect education, with more than half of the schools in Romania being at risk of losing their legal personality, deputy floor leader of the Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania in the Chamber of Deputies Szabo Odon told AGERPRES on Tuesday.
He added that the measures in the ordinance are not in accordance with what Parliament adopted by consensus - the recently released Educated Romania project, "thus jeopardising the promotion of Educated Romania moving forward."
"I hope that this ordinance will not be active or used in the area of education, since, for example, the part where it is said that if you do not have 50 employees you will be abolished cannot be used. At the moment in Bihor County, there are 179 schools, including 98 - 55% of them - with less than 50 employees. Practically, the majority of these bodies are locally unique, so the provision blatantly contradicts the new law on national education that says that in each territorial administrative unit there must be at least one educational establishment with legal personality, because otherwise school dropout increases in general, and dropout is currently at a high rate anyway," said Szabo, who is also deputy chairman of the chamber's Education Committee.
Another problem pointed out by Szabo is the fact that at the moment there are 42 school inspectorates, including 40 at the national level, that have less than 50 employees, therefore being in danger of being abolished.
"So practically tomorrow we would have to bolish the school inspectorates that are responsible for the organisation of the Baccalaureate - we have the autumn Baccalaureate precisely these days - the organisation of national examinations, the movement of teaching staff and so on," said Szabo.
He added that the draft ordinance should be reconsidered and discussed in depth, because in its current form it threatens the area of excellence as well.
"All the county centres of excellence are below this number [50 employees], so basically they would be abolished. All the school sports clubs in Romania would be abolished. None of them have more than 50 people. So basically school sports, the area of educational excellence, would be affected by this administrative intervention in the education area. I am absolutely convinced that it is a draft, and there is no way that this area - education - will remain in this emergency ordinance that the government will adopt, because it would lead to the new National Education Law getting impossible to apply, even though we have just voted for it and supported it in Parliament."
