After teacher replacement: Upset parents forced to transfer 19 students to another school

An unprecedented case in Bosnian education occurred at the beginning of the new school year when almost an entire class was deregistered from one elementary school and enrolled in another. The students' parents explain what led to such a decision.

Two days before the start of this school year (2017/2018), parents of students in class V3 of "Kovačići" Elementary School were informed that their teacher, who had taught them for the previous four years, was being transferred to the first grade. This news was announced by the principal of Kovačići Elementary School, Nađa Pejak, who at the same time completely ignored the parents' objections to such a decision.

Simultaneously, the school's pedagogue, Merima Balkić, told parents who disagreed with this decision that they could deregister their children from the school.

- The reasons presented by principal Pejak were considered illogical, impractical, and insufficient by the majority of parents. The replacement she offered for the current teacher was not accepted by the parents as adequate for many reasons. Given that she completely refused a fair dialogue in further communication and left parents without alternatives, the parents of V3 decided not to send their children on the first and second day of school. By doing so, we wanted to show the principal that she cannot, justifying it with her authority, unilaterally decide the fate of our children. In our opinion, the principal behaved extremely incompetently and unprofessionally, and we decided, believe it or not, to transfer almost the entire class to another school (19 out of 23 children) - the parents stated in their reaction.

Simply put, the attitude of the mentioned principal, her arrogant arbitrariness with a huge dose of arrogance, and her ignorant stance towards the parents' efforts to achieve at least minimal cooperation in finding a better solution to the problem forced us to take this action, the parents claim.

Class V3 (which was assessed by the school authorities as the most successful in terms of average and overall performance) is no longer part of Kovačići Elementary School, but we believe that this scandal should not end without holding the management of Kovačići Elementary School accountable, because even though we live in an absurd country, children are too important a stake to be entrusted to the wrong people, and we call on the media to help us in this.

We also express our great gratitude to the staff and management of Grbavica 1 Elementary School, led by principal Omer Begović, who showed in the best way that there is still hope in our primary education by accepting our children and enabling them to stay together as a class.

We do not know if this is the first and only time in recent history that an entire class has changed schools for such reasons, but it would be very good if it were at least the last time someone played with the fate of our children in this way.