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72 Teachers Ring In the New Year Unemployed

January 4, 2007

garden.gifChildren from five nursery schools in Batumi held one last New Year’s festival. Since December 25, five nursery schools in Batumi have begun to be closed in accordance with a decision of City Hall.  Before the New Year, 251 children were left without nursery schools, and 72 teachers were without jobs.

Tamuna Chantladze was taking her four-year-old son, Tsotne, to Nursery School # 41. Tamuna learned about the shuttering of the school a day before its planned closure. “Today, we had a New Year’s festival at the nursery school. Yesterday, we learned for the first time that the school will be closed after today. There were two nursery schools in our district, but there are already a lot of children in one, and so they will not accept my child. If they wanted to close the schools, they should have done it last May. How can they do this in the middle of the school year?”

Manoni Kalandadze is a parent and also protests the closing of the nursery school. “They pretend to close this school because of the poor conditions in it. They should have done this at the beginning of the year. They have thrown our children out without warning.”

Teachers of the closed nursery schools are left out in the cold, too. Their monthly salary was 52 lari. Nazi Telia said that the government has broken the law. “They did not warn us beforehand. They spoke about school closings in August, but then they allowed us to begin work. Last Friday City Hall finally decided to close us. We had a right to learn about this fact in advance so that we could warn parents.”

Lawyer Bakuri Bakuridze said that “according to the Law on Public Service, employees of the nursery school should have been informed about the closings a month before they were put in place.”

Gela Surmanidze, the head of the Educational Department of the City Hall, said that teachers were indeed informed about the closing.  “The process will take a month, so therefore we warned them [as required by the law].”

The reason for closing the nursery schools is to create better conditions for children, said Natia Surguladze, chief of the Department for Education, Culture, Tourism and Sports.  She also said that she would resolve any problems with placing children in new nursery schools. “The heads of the nursery schools claim that they would not accept more children at their schools. We intend to meet with these people to discuss the issue.  If they do not want to cooperate, we will exercise our right and fire them.”

Officials at City Hall also insist that they will find new jobs for the unemployed teachers. However, they say that there are only thirty teacher vacancies currently. Rusiko Gigineishvili, the head of Nursery School # 41, does not believe the promise. “Everything is a lie. They fired us when we received only 52 laris, and who will employee us if the salaries are tripled.  They only said so to persuade us to leave our jobs without protest.”

Sofo Zhghenti, Batumi

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