Abacus training

Schoolchildren will attend electives under consumer contracts

The Ministry of Education has decided to take control of the shadow income of teachers. From now on, additional paid educational services at school - electives, clubs, excursions and trips - will be provided only under strict reporting conditions. They will need to draw up contracts with the families of students on the organization’s letterhead in several copies with all the necessary stamps and signatures. A uniform model of such an agreement for all Russian educational institutions has also been approved. And payments such as payment for security, purchase of furniture, voluntary contributions can only be made through bank accounts. The head of the department, Vladimir Filippov, recently sent the corresponding order to regional education departments, which are obliged to bring it to the attention of school directors.

Paid services in schools, as you know, have existed for a very long time. But they were almost never documented. And parents never had the opportunity to claim consumer rights to the money invested. As the Ministry of Education explained to the Vremya Novostey correspondent, the purpose of the new bureaucratic requirements is precisely to put an end to monetary arbitrariness at school and extortion from parents. There were often cases when directors, at their discretion, transferred part of the mandatory program into additional services. And the line between compulsory and optional in the school curriculum is unknown to parents, and they had to pay unconditionally for everything the teacher ordered.

The new order, according to its drafters from the ministry, will now not only restrain the heads of educational institutions from illegal commercial impulses, but will also enable families of schoolchildren to seek through the courts the high-quality implementation of the notorious paid services. The constitutional right to free education will also be more respected. There remains, however, one “but”: the ministry, having approved the form of the agreement, did not decide on a single price list.

Kirill VASILENKO