Minister of Education Slavica Đukić Dejanović will fight in Bujanovac on Friday. In the National Council of Albanians, they expect to jointly solve, among other things, the problem of textbooks for high school students.
Namely, secondary school students in Serbia who attend classes in the Albanian language started this school year again without textbooks in their native language. They are students of two secondary schools in Preševo and one in Bujanovac. In Medveđa, the third municipality on the territory of Serbia with a majority Albanian population, they only have an elementary school.
Elementary school students in those three municipalities who study in Albanian do not have this problem. As "Bujanovačke novine" reported in mid-August, all primary school students received textbooks.
However, the high school students of these three municipalities are not.
According to Radio Free Europe (RSE) in Preševo, in the "Skanderbeg" high school, they buy textbooks in Kosovo and learn from the notes they take in class.
The director of the Secondary Technical School in Preševo, which is attended by 498 students, Teljat Arifi, told RFE/RL that the students do not have textbooks in the Albanian language at all, but that the professors transcribe certain lessons into some kind of scripts from which the students can learn.
Ćendrim Hetemi from the publishing house "Albas" says that since 2012 they have had "continuous professional contacts with the Ministry of Education of Serbia".
According to him, "Albas" sends different requests for permits for Albanian textbooks in Serbia every year. Two years ago, an agreement was reached on textbooks for primary school students, but not yet for secondary school students.
An agreement on textbooks in the Albanian language for primary schools was reached in November 2021. The following year, the representatives of the Albanian national minority in Serbia sent a "Seven-Point Plan" to the Government in which they cited the lack of textbooks in the mother tongue as one of the problems. And, still nothing.
This year, the Government of Kosovo allocated 250.000 euros for free textbooks for elementary school students who attend Albanian-language schools in Serbia.
By the way, in Serbia, 60.000 pupils attend classes in minority languages.
S.Ć./RSE
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