Pristina Education Director: Lost hours have been compensated for most schools

In most schools in the municipality of Pristina, the hours lost during the strike have not been compensated, Education Director Besiana Musmati has announced.

She said the hours were not maintained because parents did not send their children to school even though all the teachers' staff were present on Saturdays.

Unfortunately very few hours in most schools were not kept on Saturdays because parents did not send their children to school. All the teachers' staff went to school on Saturdays. So it's a really new situation, and I can say, to a certain degree of oddness, because so far we haven't had these kinds of developments, so I'm hoping the Ministry of Education will come up with a plan to show us how to replace lost hours because they're definitely lost”, she said.

Musmurat said the lost hours should definitely be replaced, but that the Ministry of Education will have to consult first with schools and parents.

I think hours should be replaced because hours are lost. I think the education ministry has had to consult municipalities, and then municipalities consult schools, so that schools themselves can set a certain time when it is most appropriate even when it can be replaced during the week because many schools have the comfort of keeping extra hours on weekdays and perhaps even combined with a weekend, but always in co-operation with their parents. And I think that if this process were decentralized more and everything not kept at the level of the ministry without consulting the municipalities at all, I think it has given its result. A good lesson has been from the strike that non-co-operation is not the behavior I have to bring forward both the municipal level and the government level. I think that only with cooperation with all the actors can you achieve better results. I think it could have been better organized if schools were the ones that would have decided for themselves”, she said.

Mousmati spoke of the top priority of this year by mentioning: building new schools and nests, the beginning of the process of digitisation in education, safety in schools, and the renovation of many schools.

She added that for the renovation of schools, this director envisions investing 1.5 million this year. “Some of the top priorities we have for 2023, which are also the continuation of 2022, is the construction of new schools and nurserys in Pristina, digitisation, the beginning of the process of digitisation in education, school safety, and the renovation of many schools in Pristina”. “The situation is not very good, because most school facilities in Pristina have been built earlier, and we have school objects which are old and in which infrastructure is not invested enough. That's why we've also started a kind of school renovation campaign, especially schools that are older, the Naim Frasher School, Sami Frasher, Elena Gjika, and so on. They need a lot of renovations, we're just starting with two schools with complete renovations, primary school éliriaı, the same model we've made at the Peter Bogdani School, and this year we've budgeted 1.5m euros that we plan to use for renovations of the” schools, she said.

So far we're well behind us that means our differences in the approach the government has had during the strike, but we also have co-operation with the construction of new nests. We generally try to overcome all political differences, which we really work without political differences for education, and we think that this is the only, right way to move on and forward reforms in education”, Musmati added. /Kankosova