Media: not a single Ukrainian-language school left in Crimea
Out of the original 16 schools in Crimea with education in the Crimean Tatar language, only seven remain, and out of the seven Ukrainian-language schools – not a single one is left, Krym.Realii reports.
“According to the official data of the so-called Crimean ministry of education, science and youth, in 2017/2018, seven municipal educational institutions are operating with Crimean Tatar as the language of education, four with Russian and Crimean Tatar as the languages of education, and five educational institutions have changed their status from Crimean Tatar-language schools to general-education establishments. That is, without determining the language of education,” explained Eskender Bariev, a member of the Crimean Tatar people’s Mejlis.
According to Leonid Kuzmin, an activist from the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Crimea, the situation with education in the Ukrainian language is even worse.
“Out of the seven Ukrainian schools there were before the occupation of Crimea, not a single one is left. All of the schools have been converted to Russian or to mixed language education, where there are classes with Ukrainian as the language of instruction. But the majority of classes are in the Russian language of instruction. A clear example of this is the Ukrainian gymnasium in Simferopol,” Kuzmin said.
Annexed Crimea’s Russian authorities have kept the number of classes in the Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian languages to a minimum at the general education schools. Representatives of the Crimean Tatars’ Mejlis have said that their people are being deprived of the opportunity to study their native language at school.
Article 10 of the so-called “Constitution of the Republic of Crimea”, which was adopted after the annexation of the peninsula, gives official status to the Crimean Tatar, Ukrainian and Russian languages.