The Belgrade Centre for Human Rights strongly condemns the Parent Council of the Belgrade Elementary School “Marko Orešković” for halting the adaptation of four classrooms to enable access to children with physical disabilities. The parents’ opposition to the inclusion project and their threats to transfer their children to another schools if children with disabilities are allowed to attend classes testify of the moral misery reigning in our society. This is not the first time such deviant “parental concern” has been expressed in Serbia’s elementary schools.The Belgrade Centre for Human Rights calls on the parents of children attending “Marko Orešković” to ask themselves whether there is a single valid reason why their children should be privileged over the children whose right to regular education they contest. What makes their children more valuable members of society? The only ‘disability’ rendering a person a worthless member of a community is ‘moral disability’, the kind invalidity these parents seem to want to pass on to their offspring. Would they continue to oppose such initiatives if their children found themselves in the same position, after an accident in the playground or a car accident on their way back from school? Such accidents do not always happen to “someone else”.
The Belgrade Centre for Human Rights calls on the Belgrade Education Secretariat to review the ‘mislaid’ request by the “Dr. Dragan Hercog School for Children with Special Needs” to adapt the classrooms in “Marko Orešković” and to invest the secured donations in the implementation of the inclusion project. The Centre demands that the Secretariat ensure that, once the project is implemented, children with physical disabilities, who are able to attend regular instruction, are integrated into regular classes and not placed in separate classes.
The Serbian Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Issues is bound to urgently submit for adoption to the Government the draft law banning discrimination of persons with disabilities submitted to it for consideration nearly a year ago. Incidents like the one in the “Marko Orešković” school testify that our society needs a law that will sanction frequent cases of discrimination against persons with disabilities.
