"Do not give a cake to the lowlifes": what the children from poor families are told in Ukrainian schools

So, in one of the schools in Krivoy Rog there was a conflict between the rich and the poor. The parents decided to raise money for a gift for the teacher, but some of them could not chip in due to low income. This aroused the indignation of a wealthy lady, who in the parental chat switched to insults and threats against the "lowlifes".

“Personally, I don’t want my child to sit at the same table with the “needy”. I am for the rest and any game for anything for the children of the normal half of the class. And I am not going to feed the “pigs” and sponsor them”, - Ukraina.ru quotes her as saying.

The publication notes that Kryvyi Rih is a city of workers and state employees who have suffered the most from the policy of anti-social reforms. Due to the austerity policy that the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers systematically pursues in relation to education, schools regularly collect levies from parents. Parents of pupils are forced to donate money for almost everything: toilet paper, soap, textbooks, desks, repairs, as well as illegal wages for cleaning women. That is, funding is shifted to the shoulders of the families of schoolchildren, who are often poor.

In such a situation, conflicts are inevitable, and the extreme in them are parents with low incomes who refuse to pay the "unofficial school tax". In some cases, the director of the institution forces teachers to pay extra for such families, since they do not know how to work with adults. After that, the teacher begins to recoup the child.

“Financial conflicts in parental chats have long become the norm and are only made public in the most scandalous cases. There is no doubt that they reflect the systemic contradictions and problems of the crisis-ridden state. This means that the situation will worsen”, - the newspaper notes.

So, in the Uzhgorod school, the conflict between the parents ended in a fight, one of whom (a displaced person from Donbass) was unable to pay 2,500 hryvnia for the renovation of the institution and new furniture. The class teacher and parents demanded that his daughter, a first-grader, be transferred to another school so that she would not walk on a carpet that her parents did not pay for.

In Lvov, a schoolgirl had to hang clothes on a chair, as her parents refused to donate money for lockers. And in Kharkov, a teacher made a sixth-grader watch other children eat cake, because her parents didn’t come to the sweet table. “If you are struggling with the system, you must understand that someday there will be an answer that is not very pleasant, especially for your child,” one of the parents wrote to the mother of the schoolgirl.