Parents' municipalities: JULY to fulfill the legal task of equipping students with books

Criticising the delay in providing school textbooks also has parents who say that this delay is only making the learning process difficult because of pandemic.

About the lack of books for sixth-grade, seventh and ninth-grade students, the education ministry has blamed the municipalities, saying they have been notified since September that there will be no new books and that pre-year books will be used for these classes.

The executive director of the Kosovo Commission Association, Saban Ibrahimi, says the Ministry of Education on the basis of legislation in force is responsible for providing students with textbooks.

He says in the catalogs they filled out DKA, the ministry has announced how many students in classrooms can be equipped with textbooks and how many students lack books.

According to him, it is meaningless that the ministry blames municipalities on the issue.

All the municipal directors have filled these notes in the catalog that has been emailed to the ministry, and it's a system where they automatically send the data to the Ministry of Education, and it's seen exactly how many students in classes can be equipped with textbooks and how many students lack textbooks. It means the ministry has been announced and has asked the municipalities for that. Then the problem is that this is arranged with an administrative guide saying that books or texts be delivered from generation to generation, but the problem is you can't force a student to return books... All these are confirmed, argued by the municipal education directors and all these notes were sent to the Ministry of Education and therefore the ministry has had to think about it, it means it cannot blame municipalities for its negligence”, he says.

Ibrahim claims that municipalities are responsible only for the distribution of texts they receive from the central level and that they are not to blame for the ministry's not supplying a percent of them with books.

The “communs have carried out responsibilities that fall under legislation in force, while repeating that for school textbooks the ministry is responsible to provide the students. Now on one side is it better to save 3.3m euros, which we don't really deny, is good to save Kosovo's budget money, but on the other hand we think it's more important that children be supplied with textbooks, because there are parents who have two or three children and a set of school books for a year can go from 60 to 80 euros and think in these economic conditions how much it can cost for a family to hold two, three children at school for textbooks only, Ibrahimi says.

Such a delay in providing students with textbooks will only damage the learning process even more, according to the chairman of the Council of Parents of Pristina, Jeton Demi.

He says that since the learning process has started four weeks late, they have not expected children to face lack of textbooks.

In this situation that we're infertile, when we're also delayed with the learning process, the further delays in book supply will only hurt us more when we're in mid-October already with no full supply of books. It should be clarified once and for all, whether the children will be supplied or not with books, so that there will be planning and planning for parents if there is no provision for cases where parents cannot buy the books to engage and buy for them. But there must be time planning and accurate declaration, not planning something else, and coming to this situation where we don't have books at school.

The charges between August and the municipalities of who is responsible for the absence of textbooks, Demi says that as parents, they are not interested in such reasoning, but want their children to have the textbooks to follow the lesson.

There have already been many parents who demand that the ministry make its book supply because it will be difficult for them. Having also planned that books will be provided by the Ministry of Education, or whether the institution is parents does not care who supplies it, but it is important for them to have books for their children. So it's required that this happen as soon as possible, most have already been supplied, but we've lost a lot of time and all of our supplies weren't performed”, he says.

Kosovo's government in July of this year has shared the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and innovation with fourm euros in additional euros for the purchase of textbooks