Resolution of Protest against the Reform Destroying the Education System in Lithuania and against the Liquidation of the Traditional Model of National Minorities Education Current liberal-conservative ruling coalition continues to impose the pseudo-reform destroying whole education system of Lithuania and, therein, traditional model of national minorities' education in our country. The teachers, alike the pupils and their parents, of Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and Belarusian schools cannot agree with that, similarly like all the people of good will - citizens of the Republic of Lithuania. Therefore, thousands of broad educational community representatives took to the streets in order to take part in protest action which requires the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania, the Government and the Ministry of Education and Science to:
1. Initiate immediately essential changes in the current procedure of educational institutions funding (the method of a pupil's basket), as nowadays the procedure does not perform its basic function of improving the quality of education by effective use of education funding. When changing the procedure it has to be assured:
a. that assumptions to close rural schools are avoided;
b. that assumption to recklessly raise the number of pupils in classes is avoided;
c. that more independence is provided to local governments when managing finances;
d. that unused (because of the decrease in pupils' number from 1st September 2012) special target grant to a pupil's basket is not transferred to the state budget.
We also demand that the part of pupil's basket for local governments is not reduced, thus ensuring proper network of educational institutions and social and local guarantees for pedagogues.

1. To postpone the adoption of frameworks of conception of improving the pedagogues' qualifications until transparently formed working group prepares an alternative draft document, which would be agreed upon with trade unions.

2. To revise the procedure of remunerations for teachers and other pedagogues in order to unambiguously establish pedagogical form of 18 contact hours. This would increase employees' social security.

3. We state, that the knowledge of the state language of graduates of national minorities' schools is fluent, they successfully pass maturity examinations of every subject in the Lithuanian language, continue their education in Lithuanian higher schools and acquire higher education. The indicator of graduates enrolling in higher education institutions often overtakes the overall indicator in the state and amounts to 79%.

   Thus we demand to:
   a. revoke the points regarding the education of national minorities from the Law on Education of the Republic of Lithuania;
   b. decline the acceptance of unifying maturity examinations of the Lithuanian language as a mother tongue and the Lithuanian language as a state language;
   c. include the examinations of mother tongue (Polish, Russian, Belarusian) into the list of obligatory maturity examinations;
   d. decline the acceptance of the discriminatory provision that schools with state teaching language are maintained at the expense of national minorities' schools;
   e. increase the pupil's basket up to 50% in the schools of national minorities.

We, gathered here, are all involved in the protest action, support the self-established pupils' and teachers' strike committees protecting their rights to teach children in their mother tongues. We also support the actions of Lithuanian Trade Union of Education, we welcome the strikes and state that we will fight for preserving the current education system in Lithuania and the traditional model of national minorities' education

2012-03-17
VILNIUS