Education unions dispute ordinance regarding teachers’ studies

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Ex-Education Minister Ecaterina Andronescu assures pre-school and primary school teachers will not be forced to complete degree education. She promises to remove the provision from the act when it goes in Parliament.

The Government Emergency Ordinance (OUG) no. 92 of December 18, 2012, saying that ‘pre-school and primary school teachers in the national system of education may continue to teach in the pre-school and primary education if they complete degree studies with the profile of their position within six years of the entry into force of the emergency ordinance,’ has attracted the opposition of education unions. The President of the Federation of Free Unions in Education (FSLI), Simion Hancescu said yesterday that the act would have to be amended in Parliament because a certain amount of tension has already built up in the system as people who have been teaching for 30-40 years already and who will retire in a few years from now are subject to the new legislation. ‘The Parliament will have to come up with another solution – it can either require higher education from those who join the system from now on or it can say that teachers without a degree will be paid at the level of secondary education. It would be a huge mistake not to reconsider this. (…) Those are very good teachers who have educated many generations of pupils. Those are pedagogical high school graduates, true teachers,’ Mediafax quotes Hancescu as having said. He noted 22,000 – 25,000 teachers without higher education were in that situation and their removal from the system would be ‘a disaster’. In response, ex-Education Minister Ecaterina Andronescu, currently Chairperson of the Education Committee in the Senate, said pre-school and primary school teachers are not required to complete higher education in the next six years in order to keep their jobs in education. ‘The National education Law, where it specifies the teaching positions, does not include the positions of pre-school and primary school teachers. We therefore need to reintroduce them because we have about 40,000 such workers in the system that we cannot even pay anymore, as the positions are no longer included in the law. The main objective of this ordinance (OUG 92/2012) in the matter was to reintroduce positions of pre-school and primary school teachers so that we can be in tune with the reality of the system’, realitatea.net quotes Andronescu as saying. She said she would remove that particular provision when the ordinance reached Parliament. ‘The ordinance will become law when it is adopted by Parliament. In Parliament we will remove the provision altogether. We could not come to an agreement with the Ministry of Justice before we introduced that article to the ordinance,’ she said.