Non-child tariff

Preschool services have become more expensive in Moscow

The Moscow authorities' struggle against extortion in schools and kindergartens has led to a logical result. From April 1, the official fee for a child’s stay in the capital’s preschool institutions will increase more than five times. City authorities have long been preparing Muscovites for the inevitability of this step; recently Mayor Yuri Luzhkov signed a resolution providing for a revision of the principle of calculating payments.

Until now, parents' monthly payments for kindergarten in Moscow amounted to 150 rubles. per month, everything else was paid by the city treasury. From April 1, parents will have to pay from 400 to 880 rubles. depending on the category of kindergarten. In accordance with the resolution of 400 rubles. Muscovites will only have to pay for their child to attend a short-stay group. Regular and combined kindergartens, of which the vast majority are in Moscow, will cost 560 rubles. A child’s visit to health and compensatory preschool institutions, “ethnocultural” and “national” kindergartens, as well as 24-hour kindergartens will cost parents 720 rubles. The most expensive will be the stay of children in secondary schools or education centers - 880 rubles. per month. But this amount will not be final either. This does not include security, in addition, as the mayor’s office explained, “with the provision of additional services - educational, developmental or recreational - the cost of attending a preschool institution will increase.”

Fortunately for parents, especially those who have more than one child, the Moscow government’s decree retains some benefits for paying for a child’s stay in a preschool institution. For families with two children of kindergarten age, a 25 percent discount is provided. Parents with three children will pay 50% of the official cost per child. “The same conditions apply to single parents, guardians, “Chernobyl” parents, and teachers,” the mayor’s office says. Various benefits are also provided to families of conscripts, disabled people and large families.

Let us recall that Moscow authorities have been talking about the inevitability of increasing parental payments for children’s education in schools and for staying in preschool institutions for several years. The head of the capital's Department of Education, Lyubov Kezina, who last year had to fire several dozen school and kindergarten directors for unreasonable collections from parents, has repeatedly reminded that maintaining one child in a kindergarten costs the city more than 5,000 rubles. “Feeding one child a day costs about 50 rubles. Thus, parents only pay for three days of food for their own children in kindergarten,” Ms. Kezina was indignant, noting that half of the parents do not even pay the required 150 rubles for kindergarten, having various benefits.

Unfortunately, shifting the costs of maintaining kindergartens from the city budget to family budgets does not solve the main problem of preschool institutions in Moscow. The reason for all sorts of “entrance fees,” “voluntary donations,” and other semi-legal but almost inevitable extortions when registering children for kindergarten is not a shortage of funds in the capital’s budget, but a catastrophic shortage of kindergartens themselves. Despite Yuri Luzhkov’s promises to at least partially solve the problem by returning repurposed departmental children’s institutions to the city, Muscovites’ needs for kindergartens are still almost twice the city’s capabilities.

Alexander GUDKOV