Every tenth Roma child finishes eight grade. From about 8000 Roma pupils that enrolled in elementary school, not even 600 finished it. The largest dropping out of schools with the Roma is in the fifth grade, and their biggest problem is learning the Macedonian language. The Roma children do not know the Macedonian language when they start going to school and causes many problems for them. This is how the condition of the Roma looks like with the education, which should improve with the new campaign “The key is your hands” – which was presented yesterday by the National Roma Centrum. The campaign according to the center is with the purpose for greater inclusion of the Roma children in schools through motivation of the parents as well as decreasing stereotypes and prejudice for the Roma pupils. “In Macedonia there is a general trend for improvement of education for the Roma pupils, but with the other pupils and teachers there is still some sort of resentment towards them” – said Asmet Elezovski, the coordinator of the campaign, on the yesterdays press-conference, who added that besides all of this the Roma are facing financial difficulties. According to him in order to solve this problem an action is needed and not just plans written on paper. Voislav Marjanovic from the Board of development of education of communities said that in the previous school year from total 700 Roma pupils 511 enrolled in high schools and all of them are with scholarships from the resource Department. There are no data in the Department why the other 200 did not enroll. He announced that they plan to open a Romany language department in the Pedagogical faculty in Skopje and a group of Roma studies on the Philological faculty.

Zaklina Gjorgevic, Journalist in daily newspaper “Utrinski vesnik”