Bandić warns: Pre-election employment and political pressure in Sarajevo Canton schools!

By: Muamer Bandić, delegate in the KS Assembly

Educators who have been trying to get employed in educational institutions in Sarajevo Canton for years should seriously prepare for the upcoming competition.

In addition to the necessary professional competencies, it is essential that they possess a high level of IT literacy and be mentally and physically prepared for the consequences of long-term stress. And this is stress caused by mobbing, pressure, and a constant atmosphere of fear that spreads through educational institutions.

Unfortunately, such an atmosphere is created by the very institutions that should be the greatest support for the education system, the Ministry of Education and Upbringing of Sarajevo Canton and the Institute for the Development of Pre-University Education of Sarajevo Canton. The education reform, which the Ministry has been presenting as a "step forward" for years, has in practice brought many educators damaged health in the form of thyroid diseases, diabetes, professional degradation, legal insecurity, and ultimately the collapse of pedagogical standards.

According to information from schools, the Ministry of Education and Upbringing of Sarajevo Canton is currently preparing the biggest deception and legal nonsense in the process of hiring employees in schools. The minister is sending her envoys to schools to "discipline" principals and secretaries, giving them instructions on how to interpret the rules for hiring staff. The goal of such action is to enable employment for pre-selected, politically suitable structures of the People and Justice party and the minister personally.

In the entire process, one of the most devastating facts is that the minister is sending envoys to schools without a single day of experience in education to lecture people who have decades of work in classrooms behind them. In a system that should be based on knowledge and professional experience, the Ministry has replaced expertise with party obedience.

The Institute for the Development of Pre-University Education of Sarajevo Canton plays a key role in implementing this NiP clientelist "reform". Instead of being a professional support for schools and teachers, the Institute, through so-called "expert supervision", has become an instrument for disciplining all those who have their own opinion and professional integrity. Principals and teachers with the most knowledge and experience in education, who disagree with such Ministry policies, are particularly targeted.

It is regrettable that the Institute does not deal with improving the quality of teaching at all, nor with providing real support to schools. Instead, it has been transformed into a para-political mechanism for hunting down dissidents. An institution that should be a space for professional dialogue and educational development has become a tool of political control and intimidation.

Legally devastating is the fact that no one in the Ministry of Education and Upbringing of Sarajevo Canton and the Institute for the Development of Pre-University Education of Sarajevo Canton knows that every supervision must meet material and procedural conditions in order to be legal. This means that every supervision must have its limits and cannot be repeated indefinitely on the same issue and based on the same facts. But apparently, no one cares, as long as space is created for pre-election employment of party cadres.

The current form of "expert supervision" represents a classic example of totalitarian political pressure on principals and employees. Multiple supervisions on the same issue are carried out on principals and educators who are "inconvenient" for the minister. And they are repeated endlessly until a "desirable" conclusion is reached.

As a rule, each supervision represents a unique procedure that concludes with an appropriate legal act. The Institute concludes the supervision with a report. The report itself is not an administrative act, because the Institute is not an administrative body, so it remains legally unclear what it actually supervises.

One thing is completely clear, the Institute has become a toy in someone's hands, or rather, a mechanism for intimidating educators and forcibly implementing the political will of exclusively one person.

In a society striving for the democratic standards of the European Union, schools must not be places for political showdowns and enforcing political obedience, but spaces for spreading knowledge, freedom of thought, developing critical thinking, and fostering professional integrity. In a free society, educators must not live in fear of retaliation simply because they have a professional opinion.

Unfortunately, neither the Ministry nor the Institute understand that education cannot progress in an atmosphere of fear. Instead of a system that motivates and empowers teachers, a system is being built that humiliates and exhausts them. And a society that humiliates its educators also humiliates its own future.