Budget “Preserves” Ukrainian Education
The 2003 budget bill, adopted by Verkhovna Rada in the first reading, envisages reductions in educational spending compared to this year, Minister of Education and Science Vasyl Kremen told a news conference last Tuesday (this year the MES budget alone is to be cut by UAH 150 million). Unless the budget appropriations are raised in the final text of the bill, next year’s progress in science and education will be “preserved” (like pickles), he stressed. Out of eight billion hryvnias found by the parliamentary budget committee, not a hryvnia will be added to education; in fact, the budget committee reduced cabinet-proposed sums for certain budget expense items. Thus, almost three million hryvnias were deleted from the column “Schooling and Methodological Work.” This money was originally put aside for the development of curricula and for various educational aids that are especially important in the transition to a twelve-year system of instruction. This looks rather strange after what Budget Committee Chairman Petro Poroshenko said at a meeting of the legislative Committee for Science and Education — that every effort would be made to increase budget spending in the educational sphere and that he would like to have the financing priorities from the state. Incidentally, the column “Research and Technological Programs” was relieved of UAH 8 million, leaving 900,000 — and this considering that the state owes enough and more to the authors of such programs (they have already referred the matter to a court of law), so how will all these debts be repaid?
Likewise there are quite enough debts to be paid in the sphere of education. Municipal services were not paid for everywhere last December and the outstanding amount totals UAH 40 million; add here 55 million worth of unpaid bills in September-October of this year. There is 15 million hryvnias’ worth of school textbooks in the warehouses, precisely the kind our children need so badly. The publishers are waiting to be paid by the state. They are in no hurry to believe the government’s word — and they could be right, considering that 300,000 hryvnias was actually provided for the computerization project by the start of this school year, instead 45 million promised by the state.
MES planned to pay the teachers’ salaries in keeping with the law (Article 57 of the law On Education). It was further planned to raise their pay to the industrial average in 2004-05, while keeping them close to the living wage in 2003-04. As it is, the budget bill’s appropriations for education will not allow the teachers to expect even a minimum pay rise. Next year, MES plans to institute occupational fitness tests for the entrants of teacher’s training colleges. Who are they going to choose from? From all those that failed the entrance exams of prestigious institutions of higher education [and applied to such colleges]? What young men and women will be attracted by the prospect of salaries lower than the living wage?
Care for children is the highest priority in any civilized society. It requires heavy funding. In Ukraine, the burden of computerization is proposed to be shifted to the shoulders of local budgets that often cannot afford to pay for central heating in classrooms. What kind of competitiveness can our children expect without mastering their computer ABCs?
Some 9,000 children of school age do not go to school in Ukraine, including about 2,000 elementary school students. Most such children are found in Dnipropetrovsk and Transcarpathian oblasts. Over the past several years their number has decreased five times, but lowering this number further calls for significant spending, including special teacher’s training courses and working out special curricula and teaching methods. All these expenses will be repaid to society a hundred times over when it will no longer be necessary to finance social programs for homeless children and to prevent juvenile delinquency, let alone other more complicated things.
The World Bank found the Ukrainian GDP ratio of educational spending the lowest in Europe (some 4%). Considering its par value, it is difficult to understand the budget committee and all those lawmakers voting for such budget expense items, especially remembering their campaign programs packed with better education promises.
