Translated material
Seven thousand rubles per child
A program to resettle orphanages is being launched in the Kaliningrad region
The head of the westernmost Russian region, Georgy Boos, decided to resettle orphanages in the Kaliningrad region. And in the future, he wants to close them altogether, finding a family for each orphanage resident.Mr. Boos first voiced this idea before the New Year. Like many other proposals of the ambitious Kaliningrad governor, at first it seemed unrealistic. But the regional Ministry of Education, having received the appropriate instructions, got to work. And at the last meeting of the government of the Kaliningrad region, a program for solving the “children’s issue” was presented. Within two years, it is planned to build ten family-type orphanages (creating conditions as close as possible to those at home), eleven special centers for social and pedagogical support for boarding school graduates who do not have housing, and to buy apartments for 400 orphanage residents.
According to Deputy Minister of Education Anastasia Khrebtova, this will not be cheap - you will have to pay about a thousand dollars for one square meter. In general, the program will require approximately 400 million rubles. - let it be a lot, but such an amount must be found, because, as the official put it, “children are sacred.” Nevertheless, having heard such figures, Mr. Boos asked: “Where do these figures come from? Have you counted them? Ms. Khrebtova replied that “that’s what the experts advised.” The governor got angry: “There’s no need to suck up mythical figures. And we ourselves know very well that children are sacred. Let’s do without slogans.”
Then the discussion took a more business-like tone. Considering that it was too expensive to attempt to resettle all orphanages at once, Mr. Boos proposed limiting himself to an experiment for 2006. “We will take two orphanages. And we will resettle them. Let's see how things go. And if everything is successful, then we will launch a whole program - start preparing it,” the governor said. Experimental orphanages have not yet been selected (it is possible that one will be in the Slavsky district of the region). But the resettlement mechanism has already been worked out. As Vremya Novostei was told by the regional Ministry of Education, a family orphanage will be organized if both spouses wish to foster no less than five and no more than ten children. They can all live together in the apartment of their adoptive parents, but in 2006 it is planned to build a separate house for the “experimenters.” And then it is planned to erect five such buildings every year. Seven thousand rubles will be allocated monthly from the regional budget for the maintenance of each “adopted child”. This is good money by local standards - the consumer basket in the region is more than two times smaller (RUB 3,254). In essence, it is proposed to make raising children a job with additional payments for overtime (20%) and increased complexity (30% for a disabled child or a child with deviant behavior).
In the Kaliningrad region, up to 500 children are sent to orphanages every year (and there are about fifty of them in the region, depending on their specialization). And this figure has remained consistently high for the last eight years. In general, according to Mr. Boos, the region has a very bad demographic situation: “The mortality rate exceeds the birth rate, and even through migration the situation is not improving.” Currently, about 2.5 thousand orphans are being raised in Kaliningrad orphanages.
The regional Duma, the regional Public Chamber and the office of the regional ombudsman for human rights were also involved in the development of the children's program. The chairman of the parliamentary committee on law and order and security, Boris Batalin, calls such a program a “breakthrough.” In his opinion, this will make it possible to quickly and effectively resolve the issue of adaptation and normal upbringing of orphanage residents. The main thing here is the requirements for families who want to adopt a child for seven thousand. The governor has already stated that the selection will be strict - no one will be able to “warm up their hands” on children. “We will select people like astronauts. We will take into account everything - from living conditions and earnings to moral character,” Mr. Boos emphasized.
And regional ombudsman Irina Vershinina believes that it is necessary to pay attention to the legal protection of children: since there are still no guarantees that “foster parents will not try to appropriate the housing that the region will build for former orphanage residents.”