General Overview of the Bulgarian System of Special Schools(monitoring, carried out in the period March-September 2002 by the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee)

From March to September 2002 Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC) carried out monitoring of all special schools in Bulgaria. The main goal of the project was to provide an overview of the system of schools for mentally disabled children, in order to describe as thoroughly as possible all the activities of these schools. The research focused specifically on the process of diagnosing and placing pupils in the special schools and on the educational process within the schools. Data from the schools were collected through the use of a questionnaire that had been prepared in advance.

During the course of this project, the team visited 74 special schools and 4 mainstream schools that had opened classrooms for special education. The latter were the school in Svishtov, two schools in Montana, and the school in the village of Parvomajtsi. All the schools visited during this project (with the exception of one school in the city of Burgas) are under the direct supervision of and directly subsidized by the Ministry of Education. The BHC visited about half of the visits to these schools with the accompaniment of experts from the relevant regional Educational Inspectorates (EI). In some cases the team invited experts from the regional EI, but these officials refused the invitations because of financial concerns or because they were “very busy” with other work. Those experts who did accompany the BHC researchers generally showed little interest or concern for the questions that the teams discussed with the staff and pupils in the special schools and did not try to help the school principals find solutions to the problems that they raised.

By their nature and their official designation, special schools are those schools that educate children with minor mental disabilities. Since about half of the special schools are full-time boarding schools, they share many characteristics with orphanages and other homes for children whose parents cannot take care of them. The fact that these special schools also provide social assistance in the form of food, clothing, shoes, and free textbooks is an additional stimulus for poor families to enroll their children to study there. As opposed to the orphanages and homes described above, however, these schools receive far less attention and assistance from the state and from private sponsors. The material conditions and educational facilities in these schools are more similar to those in the Social Pedagogical Boarding Schools (SPBS) and Disciplinary Boarding Schools (DBS). Moreover, both groups of children – those with mental disabilities and those with deviant behavior – are equally victims of social stigmas and negative attitudes towards “problem children” and have a tendency to be segregated in institutions separate from other children.

About 90% of the children who receive their education in special schools in Bulgaria have been diagnosed with “minor mental disabilities.” Until September 2002, Bulgarian legislation treated only this group and a small number of children with “moderate mental disabilities” as educable. Children with more serious mental disabilities were placed in a different kind of institution – Homes for Mentally Disabled Children and Youth (HMDCY) – which fall under the supervision of the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy. In the latter, children do not receive any education.

As in other children’s institutions, in the special schools the percentage of pupils of Roma origins is very high. The BHC team’s research shows that out of the total of about 10,000 children who were educated in special schools during the 2001-2 and 2002-3 academic years, at least 51% were Roma. This is an approximate figure, based on the estimates of the school principals and teachers in the special schools, who were asked about the proportion of Roma to ethnic Bulgarian children in their schools. The BHC researchers found that the principals’ reactions to this question varied. Some were hesitant or reluctant to state that a particular child is a Rom and others answered categorically that 80% or 90% of the children in a particular school are Roma. The principals of the second type explained their answer by stating that they had purposely sought out and recruited children from the Roma neighborhoods in their city. This was because these were the neighborhoods in which it was easiest to find a large number of children who did not yet attend any school. Interviews with the children in the special schools revealed that most of them self-identified as Roma and frequently added that it was precisely because of their Roma origins that they studied in that particular type of school. A review of their files usually confirmed this – their Roma origins were noted, and in many cases at least one of their parents or their brothers and sisters had also studied in a special school. The BHC researchers were left with the general impression that about 70% of the children in each special school were Roma. The school principals stated that neither the Ministry of Education nor the Regional Educational Inspectorates collect systematic information about the pupils’ ethnic origin.

Normative FrameworkIn terms of the legislative framework regulating the activities of special schools,

the BHC study took place during a particularly interesting period at the end of the 2001-2 academic year and the beginning of 2002-3. The Ministry of Education’s Decree № 6 for the education of children with special educational needs and/or chronic illnesses was issued on August 19, 2002. This Decree replaced the Ministry of Health and Ministry of National Education’s old Instruction № 6 of March 18, 1977, which governed the placement of children and pupils with physical or psychological disabilities in special schools and special educational-disciplinary establishments. After 25 years of confusing normative regulation and even more unclear functioning in the system of special schools, the Decree finally attempted to reform the system and to bring it into accordance with international standards for guaranteeing children with special educational needs the right to education. Although the draft of this decree was prepared as early as 2000, the Ministry of Education presented it to the people working in the system of special schools only in March 2002. These people’s comments and suggestions were not taken into account during the preparation of the final draft of the law. After the Decree was published in the State Gazette, hardly any instructions for the implementation in the 2002-3 school year of the new texts on diagnosing children followed. The only exception was Minister Vladimir Atanasov’s instruction on the integration of children and pupils from minority groups. This instruction was to be found in Appendix 10 of the Ministry of Education’s collected instructions for the 2002-3 school year. This text points out the especially large percentage of Roma children who are accepted into special schools despite the assumption of many that these children do not actually have mental disabilities. This instruction requires the Regional Educational Inspectorate’s diagnostic committees to precisely diagnose the children and to ensure translators for those children who do not speak fluent Bulgarian at the moment of their diagnosis.

Since the BHC was familiar with the draft of the Ministry of Education’s new decree, the research teams strove to collect the opinions and suggestions of the special school teachers and principals about the decree even before it took effect. Unfortunately, most of the teachers and principals showed passivity, fear, or silent disapproval towards the law. In other cases the interviewees simply showed nihilistic or resigned attitudes towards the process of reform. Once the Decree was officially passed, the BHC team continued to ask workers in the system of special schools to share their opinions of the new law. Some of the principals at that point expressed clear disapproval of the Decree and explained that they had previously provided the Ministry of Education with suggestions about certain points in the Decree, but that the Ministry paid no attention. Most of the specialists in the schools believed that it would be impossible to implement the Decree precisely unless many other problems in the mainstream schools are solved first. These specialists argued that the Decree’s implementation also depended on the creation of a working system of funding and financial assistance for integrated education for special needs children in mainstream schools. Moreover, they emphasized the fundamental problem that is rooted in the lack of positive public opinion towards the idea of mainstreaming special needs children into Bulgarian society at large.

The BHC researchers noted a plethora of problems related to the Decree’s implementation. These will be discussed in more detail later on in this report. Indisputably the most serious problem was the Decree’s incompetent and misguided interpretation and its inaccurate implementation, both of which are the result of a number of different factors. One important factor was the absence of explicit instructions from the Ministry of Education; another was the lack of ministerial oversight during the Decree’s interpretation and implementation.

When the BHC team began its visits to the special schools in March of 2002, only one normative act dealt with the procedures for identifying, diagnosing, and placing children in these schools. This was the Ministry of National Health and Ministry of National Education’s joint Instruction № 6 (issued on March 18, 1977) on the placement of children and pupils with physical or psychiatric disabilities in special schools and special educational-disciplinary establishments. This Instruction was never published in the State Gazette. The BHC team obtained a copy of the Instruction from a psychologist on the diagnostic commission under the Regional Educational Inspectorate in the municipality of Sofia. This was necessary because even the Ministry of Education’s Department of Integration of Children with Special Educational Needs did not have a copy of the instruction. Another normative act, the Handbook for the Enforcement of the National Education Act (HENEA), also dealt with some of the problems related to the special schools.

Identifying, Diagnosing, and Placing Children in Special Schools

According to Instruction № 6 of 1977, “The persons responsible for identifying and providing initial information about children with physical and psychological disabilities include: principals of mainstream schools and kindergartens, directors of homes for small children, doctors in pediatric clinics, and doctors working in preschools and homes for the medical and social care of small children.”

The directors of the institutions listed above were required to provide the regional medical-pedagogical commissions with the files and health records (including an order for an examination) of the children identified as potential candidates for special schools. This had to be done by July 30 each year. In mainstream schools, the principals and school doctors responsible for the pupils’ annual physical examinations were supposed to identify first through third graders with physical or psychological disabilities. Accordingly, the mainstream schools’ principals were supposed to start a cardfile on all pupils who were falling behind in their schoolwork by December 30. They also had to organize the purposeful and systematic testing of these children’s academic progress and behavior and to record the results of these tests. They had to organize periodic consultations with pedagogical defectologists in the schools. These teachers were supposed to look over the recorded test results and develop personal impressions of all the pupils in question. By the March 30 deadline, the pupils whose records showed that their poor academic performance was due to physical or psychological disabilities were sent to regional psychiatric dispensaries for preliminary diagnosis. Finally, the school principals and doctors in the mainstream schools were required to send the birth certificates, school records, academic characteristics, health records (with orders for the examination), and samples of the relevant pupils’ written work and drawings to the Regional Educational Inspectorates’ medical-pedagogical commissions

The medical-pedagogical commissions were responsible for conducting clinical psychological examinations aimed at a qualitative analysis of the children’s psycho-physical development. The commissions consisted of a director, who was the Ministry of Education’s Regional Educational Inspector for special schools, and a doctor (either a neurologist of a psychiatrist), a special education teacher, a psychologist, a speech therapist, and a primary teacher from a mainstream school.

Practice on Placing Children in Special SchoolsUnfortunately, by the time the BHC team began its research this system of

identifying and diagnosing children with mental disabilities was not functioning according to the procedure described above at all. This was due to several reasons. One reason is that the reforms in the health care system, which began in 2000, eliminated the full-time doctors who had previously been stationed in mainstream schools. Furthermore, the principals in the mainstream schools had long since stopped fulfilling their responsibility to follow up with children who were falling behind academically and to consult with teachers in the special schools and with the Ministry of Education’s Regional Educational Inspectorate about diagnosing these children. This situation can be best explained with the demographic crisis that began to effect Bulgarian schools several years ago, drastically reducing the number of pupils enrolled. Since the number of teachers who can be supported on the school payrolls depends on the number of children enrolled, massive layoffs occurred at the beginning of this crisis. In order to reduce the number of staff who would have to be cut, the mainstream schools hide the fact that some of their pupils have special educational needs. Instead, they pass these children from grade level to grade level even though their actual knowledge does not correspond to minimum state academic requirements.

Considering this situation, the majority of special schools worked out different methods of identifying children to enroll. First of all, they began advertising the education that they provide on cable television stations, on radio, and through brochures and fliers. Secondly, the psychologists and teachers from special schools began making rounds of mainstream schools in the region and talking to the teachers there. Later, they would seek out the addresses and telephone numbers of the children, whom they suspected could be diagnosed with mental disabilities. They would meet with the parents, explain to them the conditions for placement and education in special schools, and inform them about the time and place of the next meeting of the Diagnostic Commission. This method of identifying children with special educational needs practically worked its way into the official job descriptions of teachers working in the special schools. When these teachers got word of children who were subject to mandatory education but who did not attend school regularly, they also made the rounds of their homes to talk to their parents. They also sought out children from the Homes for Mentally Disabled Children and Youth (HMDCY), but it was not possible to place these children in special schools until September 2002. Children from the HMDCY were placed only in a few exceptional schools for the 2001-2 school year. The Regional Educational Inspectorate’s Diagnostic Commission follows up on children who have been identified and placed in special schools in this way. The Commission meets twice a year – in May and in September – in each special school. The meetings are one day long and usually 15 children can be examined per meeting. In many schools the Diagnostic Commission’s September

meeting takes place after the opening of the school year. This requires children who are scheduled for examination in September to be placed and to begin their education in the special school before they have been properly diagnosed.

The medical-pedagogical or Diagnostic Commission (the latter name was adopted by the Ministry of Education’s new Decree № 6) is the organ initially diagnoses children for placement in special schools. The BHC researchers were left with the impression that for most of the pupils this initial diagnosis represents the only examination by a team of 5 specialists that the children undergo during their entire education in the special schools. Very few children are ever re-diagnosed or determined by the Commission to progress in their psycho-physical development so that they can be returned to mainstream schools.

For a child to be placed in a special school, it is enough for him to have any one of the following disabilities, enumerated in Article 3 of Instruction № 6:

1. Minor mental deficiency (as defined in Rubric 311 of the International Classification of Diseases).

2. Moderate mental deficiency, equivalent to the “severe retardation” defined in the classical, three-degree classification.

3. Residual retardation that began at a later stage in the child’s development after a case of meningitis, encephalitis, infection, intoxication, head trauma, or other illness or injury, as long as the mental deficiency is no more severe than those designated in points 1 and 2.

4. Progressive brain disease (epilepsy, schizophrenia, etc.) resulting in mental deficiency no more severe than those designated in points 1 and 2.

Article 2 of the Instruction defines a child with mental disability as “a child whose intellectual ability is permanently impaired because of organic damage to the brain.” The Instruction also designated certain groups of children as ineducable, even in special schools. These were “children with moderate, severe, and complete mental retardation,” “children with temporary setbacks to their psycho-physical development (learning disabilities, asthenia, infantilism),” and “children with mental abilities on the borderline between normal and pathological (as under Rubric 310 of the International Classification of Diseases).”Article 14 of the Instruction also prohibits the placement in special schools of children with severe personality deviations, schizophrenia, or other psychoses that would prevent their inclusion in the children’s or pupils’ social collective and children with serious physical handicaps. According to the Ministry of Education’s new Decree № 6, children with multiple disorders and those with moderate and severe mental disabilities, who were previously treated as ineducable, as well as children with autism, must now be taught through individual development programs, either in special schools or in mainstream ones.

According to Instruction № 6, the medical-pedagogical commissions were required to consist of a psychiatrist (or neurologist), psychologist, special education teacher, primary teacher from a mainstream school, and a speech therapist. The BHC researchers found that most schools followed this regulation. In some schools the commissions did not include a teacher from a mainstream school. Other schools had difficulty, particularly during the past two years, in ensuring the participation of a psychiatrist or psychologist in the commission. Because about 1/3 of the special schools do not employ full-time psychologists, they use psychologists from the Regional Social

Welfare Assistance Service, from mainstream schools, or from among the psychologists with a private practice in the region. Psychiatrists are hired from the local diagnostic and consulting centers or general hospitals’ pediatric psychiatry departments. They may be appointed to the commissions with a decree from the Regional Health Department. However, especially since September of 2002 in some regions (Sliven, Targovishte, Pernik, and others) the psychiatrists have demanded payment for conducting the examinations and the teachers have been forced to pay them for their participation out of their own pockets. Another problem is in the fact that the psychiatrists are not aware of the normative framework dealing with the diagnosis of these children. For example, the psychiatrist in the Stara Zagora commission was unaware that children with moderate and severe mental disabilities could be placed in special schools as of September 2002. Moreover, the BHC researchers determined that the diagnoses varied in the amount of detail given from the laconic designations “MMD” (“minor mental disability) or “SMD” (severe mental disability) to “minor oligophrenia with severe retardation.” It is impossible to speak of a unified standard in the diagnoses, even though the National Center for Complex Human Studies published a Bulgarian-language version of the 10th

edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD 10) with new codes and names for psychological and behavioral disorders in 1992. The protocols from the children’s diagnostic examinations did not mention these codes and names and did not use the ICD 10’s instructions for diagnosis.

According to the ICD 10, one of the indications of mental retardation is measured with standardized and individually administered intelligence (IQ) tests. The handbook specifies the ranges of IQ that indicate each of the four degrees of mental retardation – minor, moderate, severe, and acute. The BHC team drew several conclusions from its discussions with the psychologists and psychiatrists who work in the special schools and participate in the Diagnostic Commissions. First, each of these psychologists and psychiatrists works with whichever tests he chooses to examine the intelligence, memory, understanding, creativity, and attention span of the children. These range from the Raven Matrix to the Bine-Simone-Therman test, Ivanova’s educational experiment, the Wechsler test, the Segen Board, the Goudier test, Gudinav’s human drawing, diagnostic conversations, and others. Secondly, Instruction № 6 gives no specific instructions for the diagnosis of children with mental disabilities, nor have the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Health provided any specific instructions since then. Under the Ministry of Education’s new Decree № 6 psychologists are required only to record the methods that they used to examine the various indicators. The BHC researchers determined from the protocols that they checked for psychological-pedagogical examinations conducted in September of 2002 that only a few schools followed even that requirement. Third, the examination reports frequently fail to record the results of the IQ tests, and the sections on understanding and mental activity were marked “not examined” or “cannot be examined.” As a whole the reports were filled out using as few words as possible, were all the same, and were all very schematic. In this regard, monitoring of the way the new forms introduced by the new Decree № 6 are filled out since September 2001 shows that the Decree has led to the collection of more information about the health conditions of the children being diagnosed. Moreover, despite the fact that even before the passage of Decree № 6 there were sections on the forms for hearing and sight ability, these were almost always marked “not examined.” The new Decree requires that a doctor examine

these indicators. Even though this was frequently done as a mere formality, after September 2002 it was indeed done.

Several conclusions may be drawn from the BHC team’s audit of the reports from the psychological-pedagogical examinations. First and foremost, there was no unified standard for filling out the forms and the Ministry of Education had not undertaken any oversight of this process in the past 4 or 5 years. The commission members did not state the methods used for the psychological testing. They did not record the results of the IQ tests, and they did not fill in the data on the child’s health history. The latter was often due to the lack of information or medical documentation about the children’s health conditions from infancy. Moreover, the fact that a child’s parent, brother, or sister had studied in a special school was considered sufficient evidence of a family history of mental disability. In some schools, the information on the examination reports contradicted itself. Most often this happened when the commissions faced difficulties in diagnosing children from bilingual homes and then recorded a diagnosis after conducting an examination without the aid of an interpreter. In some cases the examination reports were not dated or signed by all members of the commission.

Beginning in 1998, some special schools established diagnostic teams consisting entirely of school staff. (In some of these, the psychiatrist or psychologist were not from the school staff). These teams were made up of a psychologist, a speech therapist, a special education teacher, and the school principal. These teams’ work was not regulated until the passage of Decree № 6. These teams are ostensibly responsible for conducting periodic observations of the children’s academic development each year and for making the initial diagnosis. In the latter case, the Regional Educational Inspectorate’s expert on special schools directs the teams.

The BHC researchers noticed that the diagnostic teams worked differently in different parts of the country. In some places (Petrich, Veliko Turnovo, Pernik, and elsewhere) these teams had completely taken over the duties of the Diagnostic Commissions and conducted the entire initial diagnoses. In these cases, the examination reports were simply “signed” by the experts from the Regional Educational Inspectorates. In other schools, these teams merely followed the pupils’ ongoing academic development. A third group of schools either did not have such teams or were only now in the process of forming them. In the context of the above-mentioned demographic crisis and problems identifying and recruiting children for education in special schools, it is probably not a good idea for the children to be diagnosed by entirely internal teams. These teams will not be objective, because of their explicit interest in attracting as many children as possible to study in their schools.

During the course of this study, BHC researchers attended two meetings of the Regional Educational Inspectorates’ Diagnostic Commissions. One of these meetings was in Plovdiv on May 16, 2002, and the other was in Stara Zagora on September 9 and 10, 2002. The researchers noted many problems at these meetings. First of all, the members of the Commissions had not clearly interpreted the Decree and the Instruction. Secondly, the children’s parents were not completely informed about the type and quality of education that their children would receive in the special schools. Most parents saw the advantage of the special school as lying in the fact that it provided free textbooks, food, and internet access, and that it had smaller classes, so that their children would receive more individual attention. Some of these advantages are really indisputable. Even in the

full-time boarding schools, the living conditions are far better than those that the children would have if they lived at home with their families. And the education is more successful and provides better results than that which the children were receiving in the mainstream schools, where teachers hold children with special needs to lower standards or simply do not take an interest in these children’s problems. Indeed, mainstream schools do not yet provide appropriate conditions for the education of special needs children. And after all, the special schools are designed to educate children who have been diagnosed with mental disabilities and who truly could not get a good education in mainstream schools. However, in most cases the children in question have fallen behind in mainstream schools because of the teachers’ neglect and lack of interest, and not because the children themselves suffer from and “organic brain damage.” Furthermore, most of these children grew up in conditions of absolute poverty, usually in Roma neighborhoods and with the care of only one parent or relative, and they do not know fluent Bulgarian. They have not attended kindergarten or a mainstream school and therefore are not ready for first grade by the time the are 7 years old. Since the mainstream schools do not provide preparatory classes for these children, it is completely logical that, thrown directly into the first grade, they would fall behind and then be diagnosed with “minor mental disabilities.”

The third problem with the Diagnostic Commissions’ work has to do with their technical organization and the way the meetings are conducted. The parents of the special needs children do not always have a source of written information. They do not know about the specific special school into which their children will be placed, about the nature of special schools in general, about the Regional Educational Inspectorate, or about the documents and processes necessary for the children’s placement in the special schools. When the children have been identified and recruited by special school teachers, the parents are usually notified by telephone about the date and place of the Commission’s meeting.

In different schools, the commission members are distributed differently into the available offices. The psychologists almost always work in their own separate room. The other members of the commission are either all together in one room or distributed between two rooms. For example, the speech therapist and special education teacher might be in one room, while the psychiatrist and the expert from the Regional Educational Inspectorate are in another. Frequently, the children and their parents are interviewed simultaneously. This puts both the children and their parents under unnecessary pressure. The documents that the parents provide to the commission typically contain only scanty information, which is not enough for the commission members to develop a complete impression of the child’s condition. Nevertheless, it is on the basis of this information that the commission draws conclusions and makes the decision of whether to place the child in a special school.

Material ConditionsOf the 74 special schools in Bulgaria, about half are full-time boarding schools

and have dormitories and cafeterias. With the exception of 2 or 3 of these (which are located in the buildings of a former police station or kindergarten), the special schools use buildings that were originally designed to house mainstream schools. Most of the

latter were used as mainstream schools until the 1970s. The oldest buildings are those of the special schools in Asenovgrad, Stara Zagora, Pernik, Dobrich, Popovo, and Gabrovo. The others were built between 1930-70. BHC researchers learned that about 30 schools had problems with leaky roofs or needed urgent repairs on the heating, water, or electrical systems. Some of these schools were able to deal with the problems using only the funds that the principals were able to secure from private sponsors. Others, especially those in smaller towns, were still waiting for state subsidies with which to fix their problems. The school in Dolni Dabnik provides the most drastic example. In 2002 the boiler exploded there. Since the boiler was located in the basement of the dormitory, the explosion presented a serious risk to the lives of the children. Of course there are also schools that still heat their rooms with wood or coal stoves. The lighting in about half of the schools is absolutely insufficient. The toilets in the schools show extremely bad hygiene, have not been repaired in decades, and do not have running water. The boarding schools are furnished with nothing more than beds and cabinets, and usually there is not enough furniture for all the children. Sheets and mattresses are donated or provided from closed army bases. The children’s clothes, shoes, underwear, and articles for personal hygiene also come predominantly from donations.

The classrooms in about 80% of the schools are furnished with nothing more than desks, cabinets, and a blackboard. Any ongoing repairs or remodeling are done with the teachers’ and pupils’ unpaid labor and with donated materials. Workshops for woodworking, metalworking, and sewing were furnished with machines back in the 1970s. If a school has newer furnishings, this is thanks to private donations. About 90% of the schools have gymnasiums and television rooms, but these were also furnished 20-25 years ago.

As a whole, the facilities that the special schools inhabit are very old, out of date, broken down, and in some cases inappropriate or unacceptable for the education of children with special needs.

In the past 2-3 years, and even before that, the state has stopped providing subsidies to special schools for repairs, renovations, maintenance, or furniture. When these are necessary, the principals and teachers are entirely responsible for finding the resources to pay for them.

Medical Care

The medical care of children in special schools has proven to be a complicated and as yet unsolved problem. On the one hand, the municipalities have appointed half-time physician’s assistants or nurses to work in the schools. On the other hand, the children’s medical checkups and immunizations end up being conducted by the children’s personal doctors. Only in a few schools do the medical personnel who work in the schools provide these services. In that regard, it is particularly problematic that many of the children in the special schools have no personal doctor to provide them with these routine medical services. Some of the children are assigned personal doctors based on where they live, so if they attend a boarding school their doctor’s office is located in the same town or village where the school is. Although this is true for some boarding schools, it is not in others. Consequently, some children’s personal doctors are located in

the town where their parents live, not the town where the school is, and so they may as well not have personal doctors at all.

Some children receive dental care from a dentist who has an unofficial arrangement with the school principal to treat the pupils for free. In schools whose principals do not have this sort of arrangement, dental care is provided only in emergencies, and the dentist is paid either from the school budget or with someone’s personal finances. Prophylactic dental exams are not provided to the children in the special schools.

The special schools provide no periodic psychiatric examinations, except in cases of children suffering from epilepsy who must take medicines on a regular basis. It is almost unheard of for children to have regular psychiatric consultations or to be re-diagnosed after their initial diagnosis for placement in a special school.

At the beginning of 2002, the Ministry of Education required the Educational Inspectorate to inspect the medical care available in the special schools. Some of the inspectors determined that there are still children who have no personal doctor. Others noted that there is no preventative care and that the children do not receive their immunizations, and that some schools do not even have a first aid kit. The schools found in violation of the regulations in this regard were not fined or punished in any way.

In most cases the children’s medical records are kept at the school. At the same time, the children have personal doctors in their parents’ place of residence, and the parents are not required to provide the schools with information from examinations conducted by those doctors. Therefore, the medical records in the schools do not provide sufficient information about the children’s health conditions.

It was also notable that the schools’ medical personnel do not maintain statistics on the illnesses and diagnoses of the student body. This is partially due to the fact that about half of the children do not have medical records or immunization records when they first enroll in the schools, and these are started only after the child enrolls.

The doctors’ offices in the schools that had them did not always meet the requirements laid out in Decree № 3 of May 9, 2000, which regulates the medical offices in kindergartens and schools. First aid kits were equipped with only the most basic supplies, and even these were available thanks to private donations.

NutritionThe fact that the special schools provide food to their pupils is especially

important, since 80% of the children are from poor families and 50% are Roma. Many of the principals themselves admitted that the free food is one of the main incentives causing most of the children and parents to choose the special schools. The situation is slightly different in the boarding schools and the day schools. The boarding schools receive state subsidies that, while insufficient on their own, help pay for the children’s food. These subsidies vary from 0.24 leva to 0.80 leva per day for food for each child. In the part-time boarding schools, where children have study halls in the afternoon, their food is provided entirely through donations. These schools do have special rooms furnished as cafeterias in which the children eat. The food that these schools offer consists predominantly of sandwiches and ready-to-eat snacks. Considering the poverty of these children’s families, this food is not sufficient to bring their calorie and vitamin intake up to the necessary levels. These children do not receive enough food or enough variety in their diets. The

Ministry of Health’s Decree 16 of 1994 sets the optimal calorie intake for children between the ages of 10 and 14 at 2400 kilocalories per day. The price of food that would provide that much energy is certainly more than 0.80 leva per day per child. The children in these schools eat meat at most twice a week. In some schools (Maglizh, Bjala Slatina) the children are served meat no more than twice a year. Fresh fruits and vegetables are also a rarity in these institutions.

The kitchens and cafeterias in these schools are typically located in the basements of the buildings, and in most cases are in serious need of renovations or of new equipment.

EducationVery few normative texts regulate the educational process in the special schools.

The Ministry of Education’s Decree № 6 stipulates the amount of time that pupils are supposed to spend in class, and the Ministry’s instruction that was issued in September 2002 specifies what types of curricula are to be used and which textbooks are acceptable.

The teachers and principals in the schools that the BHC team visited shared with the researchers a whole host of problems related to the academic process. The most commonly mentioned problem was the completely inadequate supply of textbooks. No textbooks for music and for technological training that would be appropriate for special schools have ever been published. The seventh and eighth grade textbooks for history and geography contain completely outmoded information, and so teachers teach these subjects from various brochures. Some of the schools received a small number of new textbooks for botany, zoology and anatomy between 1991 and 1994. The teachers expressed the opinion that these textbooks are interesting and well-written, but they suggested that the lessons require significant adaptation in order for pupils with special educational needs to understand them. The teachers recommended that when textbooks like these are published in the future, their authors should first consult with people who work in the system of special schools, since these people know best what the children’s interests and abilities are. Only the primary school texts have been adapted and reissued (between 1990-93), but these books are not available in sufficient quantities in most schools. When teachers and special school principals have turned to the publishers for additional copies, the publishers have responded that there are no books left, not even in the warehouses. Therefore, it is clear that the Ministry of Education’s main priority should be the publishing of textbooks for the special schools. Mainstream school texts are revised, updated, and reissued almost every year. The economic mechanism that stimulates the production of texts for mainstream schools while slowing the production of books for special schools is understandable. But that is no reason for the state to abdicate from its responsibility to ensure equal opportunities for all of its citizens to receive the required primary education.

The special schools have not received other teaching supplies, such as globes, geographical and historical maps, models for biology, botany, and anatomy, in the past 6-7 years, either. The number of notebooks available to the children in special schools depends on the ability of the individual school principals to obtain them through donations. In some schools, pupils receive 5 or 6 notebooks for the year, while in others the pupils use a single notebook for all their subjects for the whole year. Only a very few

schools mentioned that these types of school supplies were purchased with money from budget subsidies.

The lack of coordination between the publishing of new textbooks and the creation of new curricula presented a second problem related to the educational process in special schools. Because of this disconnect, the curricula for some subjects has changed, but no new textbook is available. Consequently, teachers are forced to create the lessons on their own. For other subjects, the schools have received new textbooks but the curriculum itself has not changed. This is confusing, as the books sometimes rearrange the order in which the material must be taught during the course of the year.

A third problem is presented by the lack of resources with which to organize extracurricular activities and the bureaucratic requirements restraining teachers who try to organize such activities. Considering the children’s social isolation, it is crucial that they learn subjects and skills beyond those taught in the classroom. It is also important for them to have opportunities for creative outlet, such as drawing, singing, handicrafts, etc.

The lack of sufficiently qualified personnel and the lack of motivation among current personnel to improve their qualification presented another serious problem. Special schools tend to hire underqualified teachers on temporary contracts. In some of the special schools located farthest from big cities the schools have a hard time attracting any teachers at all because of the poor working conditions that they could offer.

Children who want to continue their education after completing the classes available at the special schools have two choices. They may enter a Social Vocational School (SVS) or attend the professional classes that are offered in about half of the special schools. In those schools that do not offer professional classes, most children who want to continue their education choose to do so in a SVS. If there is no SVS nearby, most children simply stop studying after the eighth grade. The BHC team’s impression was that most pupils in special schools that do offer professional classes continue to study there after completing the eighth grade. The Ministry of Education’s new Decree № 6 allows these children the new opportunity to continue their education in mainstream high schools if they can pass an entrance examination.

The final problem related to the educational process in special schools is the need for preparatory classes for children who do not know the Bulgarian language or who lack some other skills or knowledge before they enter the first grade in the special schools. Very few schools provide such classes, since the schools administrators are not sensitive to the language problems of these children. In the past, the common practice has been to try to teach these children the Bulgarian language in the first grade.

School VacationsThe special schools do not have any budgetary resources with which to organize

summer camps or excursions for their pupils. Still, many of the special schools manage to secure enough donations to organize at least one or two field trips. A relatively high percentage of the schools were able to take their pupils to the theater, the cinema, or a museum at least once a year, thanks to private donations.

Discipline and PunishmentIn most of the schools, the teachers and principals told the BHC researchers that it

is very rare for them to punish their pupils. Since most of the children’s bad behavior is due to their illnesses and mental disabilities, the punishments allowed by the HENEA have no effect. Children are punished only in extreme cases, when their aggressive behavior towards teachers or other pupils systematically disturbs the order and discipline in the school. Punishments are administered only after the teachers’ council has held discussions with both the child and his parents. Very few schools reported that they punished the children with mandatory labor such as cleaning the toilets or helping with other necessary chores around the school. In the schools in Slavjanovo, Chokmanovo, Vetren, Kazanlak, and Topolovgrad some children said that the staff occasionally punished them with physical violence. In some of these schools the staff admitted that this was true. In other schools the BHC researchers witnessed these types of punishments.

DocumentsThe BHC researchers found that the special schools only very superficially kept

the mandatory school records. The schools are required to keep: a book on the pupils under the age of 16 who are subject to mandatory education; records of how many class hours each pupil receives; enrollment records; journals with records on each class and group of children in the boarding schools; examination records; registers of all documents resulting from the children’s passing a grade level; records of all decrees issued by the principal and his supervisory activities; minutes of all meetings of the teachers’ council; cleaning records for the school; registers of donations; and other records.

The different schools’ methods of keeping and archiving the children’s personal case files and documents varied. In some schools, the case files contain only the Diagnostic Commission’s report, the child’s birth certificate, the parents’ application for the child’s enrollment in the special school, and perhaps a report from the child’s classroom teacher in the mainstream school, if he attended one before his diagnosis with a mental disability. Other schools also keep the pupils’ medical records and other documents on the children’s illnesses and overall health status. The most complete case files include the following: results of academic testing done by a diagnostic commission or team, medical documents confirming hearing and sight ability, an individual academic program or individual development program, results of speech therapy tests, a parent’s or guardian’s application for enrollment a copy of the child’s birth certificate, samples of the child’s creative work, the drawing of a person that the child made during his diagnostic evaluation, a report from each member of the Diagnostic Commission, a yearly academic report from the child’s classroom teachers in both the mainstream (if appropriate) and special schools, a document showing the highest grade level that the child passed in the mainstream school. They also include a photograph of the child and a declaration from the parent or guardian. The declaration should state that the child has a personal doctor and that the parent takes responsibility for the child if he takes him out of school without informing the teacher. Some of these additional documents became mandatory for the 2001-2 and 2002-3 school years, and are found in the case files only of those children enrolled in the special schools during those years.

The main medical documents that the schools keep include: the children’s immunization records, ambulatory journals, records of parasite infestations, lists of the

children and their personal doctors’ names, telephone numbers and addresses, records of medicines administered to the children from the first aid kit, etc. The BHC researchers were left with the impression that these records were incomplete or out of order in most schools. This is especially true of the medical and immunization records, records of physical examinations, and records of other illnesses or multiple disorders.

One of the main problems that the BHC team noticed was the chaotic and incomplete way in which the children’s case files and particularly their health records were kept. The lack of statistical data on the pupil’s ethnic and family backgrounds and on their diagnoses is also a problem. There was also a lack of data on how many children had previously studied in mainstream schools before their placement in the special schools.

InspectionsFor at least two decades, both the legislature and all the other state organs

responsible for inspecting and regulating the special schools have all but neglected them. As in other children’s institutions, the most common inspections in the special schools are those from the Institute for Hygiene and Epidemiolgy (IHE). Of course, those inspections are no guarantee of the schools’ hygienic and sanitary conditions, since the inspectors typically warn school administrators before their visits. The BHC team did not learn of any cases in which the IHE sanctioned schools, even in those schools with the worse hygienic conditions. One particularly upsetting example is the special school in the city of Chirpan. The IHE there recommended the complete renovation of the toilets and bathrooms in that school, but the administration did not undertake the required repairs by the deadline. Consequently, the school did not receive permission from the IHE to operate during the 2002-3 academic year. Despite that, however, the school remained open during the school year in question, and none of its staff was even sanctioned. The fire department conducts inspections only during the winter when the schools are using heat, but many school administrators states that there had been no inspections for the past 4 or 5 years.

The most serious problem lies in the fact that the experts from the Ministry of Education’s Regional Educational Inspectorates express so little interest and take so little initiative to inspect the schools that are under their direct supervision. Since only 3 or 4 (of a total of 28) Regional Inspectorates have an expert on special schools, any inspections that occur are usually carried out by the experts on biology, physical education, literature, vocational training, etc. These experts’ job functions are completely different from those of the experts on special schools. Many of the experts who accompanied the BHC researchers during their visits were not familiar with the most basic problems facing the special schools. They showed no interest or initiative in listening to the school administrators or pointing them towards potential solutions to their problems. They were not familiar with the legislative framework regulating the activities of special schools, and therefore could not provide any suggestions or recommendations about the educational process in these schools. The goal of their inspections, as far as the BHC team could tell from the inspection reports kept in the schools themselves, were either to check up on the schools’ record-keeping or to follow up on complaints from teachers who had been illegally fired or unnecessarily laid off.

Hardly any special schools have been the subject of inspections regarding the placement and enrollment of pupils. Moreover, after the Ministry of Education ordered an inspection of the medical care provided in the schools, no personnel were sanctioned, even though inspectors found numerous violations of the regulations. Ministry of Education staff have not visited any of the special schools in over 4 years. The Regional Educational Inspectorate’s experts explained the lack of interest in special schools with the lack of funds for inspectors to travel to the schools. They also explained that the inspectors are very busy with their other job responsibilities.

Personnel The staffs in the special schools are very small, as consist only of teachers, aides,

and usually a speech therapist. About 1/3 of the schools do not have a psychologist. A relatively large percentage of the teachers in the schools did not have a university degree, but instead had a certificate for training in special education. The service and administrative staffs are also too small, especially in the boarding schools. The salaries for staff in these schools are very small, and the schools have a problem reimbursing staff for their job-related travel expenses. Many of the schools are in small villages and their personnel come predominantly from the nearest big city. All employees must travel every day to the school and back, but only the teachers are reimbursed for a percentage (the BHC team heard different percentages from different teachers) of their travel expenses. Even these percentages are reimbursed several months after they are reported.

Forced to take jobs in the special schools because of the high unemployment elsewhere, the teachers in these schools work in practically intolerable conditions. They have to develop lesson plans for most of the subjects on their own, since they do not have textbooks or sample lessons. They bind, glue, and sew together old and torn textbooks each year, photocopy or type up (on the school’s one computer) poems or stories to distribute to the pupils, since there are no literature textbooks. They seek donations so that they can provide the pupils with notebooks and pens on the first day of school. They repair the school buildings and paint the walls themselves and without any pay. They have not sought advice or assistance from the Ministry of Education for years, since in the past the Ministry’s response was always that there are no funds. The speech therapists and psychologists also provide teaching materials that they buy with their own funds. The state subsidies in most of the schools covers only the teachers salaries and insurance, and the budget for daily maintenance isn’t enough even for the most basic food products.

LaborThe children in the special schools work both in and outside of the schools. In the

schools they usually help with the cleaning in the dormitories and classrooms, serving or cleaning in the cafeteria, and changing the bedclothes. The older children in the schools in smaller towns and villages sometimes work for local residents, helping out with the harvest, digging in the fields, carrying wood, etc. In return for their work they usually receive a small amount of money (between 2-3 leva), or they are paid in kind with food or clothing.

Basic Human RightsThe children in some of the special schools told BHC researchers that the school

staff treated them without respect or beat them (see the section on Discipline and Punishment). In other schools the children complained that the staff were negligent or did not take responsibility for pupils.

The pupils in the special schools are allowed to care for their own appearance and to dress however they like. But since their clothing, shoes, and underwear come from donations, in fact they do not have much choice. Only a few schools provide each child with his own cabinet for personal belongings. Usually all the clothes, sheets, and towels are shared. Since this makes lice a serious problem in the schools, most children have very short haircuts. The children also have poor personal hygiene, old shoes (usually not in their correct size and not appropriate to the season), and dirty and torn clothing.

Almost all of the children expressed an interest in particular television programs and had the opportunity to watch television at school. They did not have radios, books, or children’s magazines, however. Even the schools that have libraries can offer the children only old books from the 1970s. Many teachers expressed the opinion that the children from the special schools are victims of a social stigma in Bulgarian society, as a result of which they are not allowed to enter public libraries, children’s centers, and other organizations. This situation only worsens these children’s social isolation and additionally slows their personal development. Still, there are some non-governmental organizations that organize sporting events or sponsor talented children who want to give concerts of art shows.

As institutions that for 40 or 50 years have existed out of the sight of Bulgarian society and without state assistance, the special schools are now in need of serious reform. This reform requires not only changes to the normative framework regulating the schools’ activities. It also requires solutions to practical problems related to the medical care and diagnosis of children with mental disabilities, to the provision of textbooks and school supplies, and urgent repairs to the schools’ buildings and facilities. The integration of children with special educational needs into Bulgarian society will require the establishment of effective mechanisms for educating these children in mainstream schools with financial assistance from the state. The system of special education will also require the Ministry of Education to systematically supervise the work of the Diagnostic Commissions and to give the Commissions clear instructions. Only in this way can the ill-fated practices that have existed until now be overcome.