Parents’ Debts Upset Children’s Education

“The twin sisters Natalia and Larysa have not reported to school for the past eight days, because they have nothing to wear,” The Day was informed on November 25 by Andzhela Filenko, seventh grade class master from Velyka Oleksandrivka, a village in Khmelnytsky oblast. Inna and Mykhailo Hrynevych, their parents, are no bums or drunks. They a perfectly normal citizens. Inna tends the calves at the local collective farm and Mykhailo works there as a mechanic. They have to report for work wearing rags and freezing. Yuri Popovych, an official of the district state administration, knows that as the frost came poor children at the villages of Bystrytsia and Pylypy-Oleksandrivsky stopped going to school for the same reason. And no local bureaucrats dealing with education and “family and youth affairs” know the exact number of such poverty-stricken children in Khmelnytsky oblast. The local statistics department reports that the peasants are owed 127 million hryvnias in wage arrears, meaning an average of 723 hryvnias (about $145 — Ed. ) per agricultural worker. Having this hard-earned money, parents would surely keep their children dressed, reports The Day’s Mykhailo VASYLEVSKY .