Some 20 elementary school students from a village in southeastern Macedonia may be left without a certificate of completion at the end of the school year. The problem, it seems, is that they were taught in all-Albanian classes, from first to fourth grade. The classes are considered illegal because they do not satisfy the quota of 24 students per class, as required by law.
Angry and frustrated parents are demanding of local officials to solve this problem threatening to take their kids to schools in neighboring Kosovo or Albania. They feel their children are entitled to be taught and to learn in their native tongue. Local officials claim that they originally got express approval from the Ministry of education to assemble these classes but politics got in the way and that approval was unfairly withdrawn.
Another incident occurred in the Macedonian capital of Skopje. Four schools in the predominantly Albanian municipality of Cair, which were originally named after prominent (ethnic) Macedonian leaders, changed their names to Albanian titles. These new names honor leaders of the Albanian political movement. This action prompted the Macedonian education minister to threaten charges against the schools, or “if they do nothing, [use] other mechanisms at disposal.”
The Ohrid Framework Agreement, which was signed in 2001 to end the seven-month armed conflict between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians, clearly states, ”With respect to primary and secondary education, instruction will be provided in the students’ native languages, while at the same time uniform standards for academic programs will be applied throughout Macedonia.” Given the fact that Albanian is also one of the official languages of the country since 2002, one can only hope that (in the words of one local official) ”all of those who work in the educational system [do] not abuse these children on a daily basis, for political purposes.”
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