More parents launch petition, thereby demanding removing corruption from Moldova's education system

Chisinau, 13 September /MOLDPRES/ - More parents today launched a petition titled, We want education without foundation and association. In the petition, they demand that the authorities implement efficient mechanisms due to prevent the corruption phenomenon in the education system.  

According to the petition’s authors, corruption remains a widely spread problem in Moldova’s education system. “As a result of the work of this criminal system of collecting informal taxes (estimated at 184 million lei annually in the pre-school institutions from Chisinau alone), tens of thousands of parents of children from Moldova’s schools and kindergartens are systematically terrorized with insistent requests to pay money “for the good of the child.” Often, children’s admission to a state education institution or the release of acts for finishing the education is conditioned by the payment of the due to the “association”, money donation or material goods,” the petition reads.

The parents said that the most serious situation in this respect was in the Chisinau city and other big cities of Moldova, where money is demanded under a lot of pretexts, sometime even for assets/works which have been already bought from budget resources. The initiative’s authors say that the people refusing to participate in the collections of money or to “voluntarily donate” the sums demanded are intimidated, discriminated, excluded from collectives of parents, are subjected to degrading treatments, including on behalf of employees of education institutions, which hits including the children.   

The petition’s initiators demand that the work of parents’ associations in schools be banned and the headmasters of the education institutions who received remunerations and undue incomes from money of associations be dismissed.

In the beginning of the current school year, the Education, Culture and Research Ministry issued an order according to which the collection of informal payments in the education system is prohibited.   

The National Anticorruption Centre (CNA) has earlier unmasked more cases of corruption in the education sector. In all, about 110 notifications on corruption actions in education institutions were submitted to CNA in the first nine months of the last year, which would mean that 12 citizens would monthly denounce new cases of corruption in the education field. CNA’s data shows that, in the first nine months of 2018, more than 60 teachers got in the focus of anticorruption officers. At the same time, according to an opinion poll, the sum of illegal payments in education institutions would have doubled.