Ion Cheban
Referendum and scandal in parliament
Mayor Ion Ceban claims that there is an attempt to re-subordinate more than 330 educational institutions in Chisinau, where 108 thousand pupils study and 17 thousand employees work, to a specialized ministry, without taking into account the opinion of teachers and parents. The mayor said that the hidden motive is financial, and the ultimate goal is to reduce the capital’s budget.
In this context, Ceban announced that his MAN party has instructed lawyers to launch legal procedures to organize a local referendum in Chisinau on the status of schools and the reform of local public administration.
“First, we are referring to the so-called reform of local public administration, which some PAS leaders praise so much. And secondly, it is certainly related to schools in this context. As for the Chisinau municipality, I will ask lawyers to show what the municipality’s statute says about the organization of local referendum,” Ceban said.
The mayor came to the plenary session of the parliament, trying to go to the central tribune. Speaker Igor Grosu said that this was “the most typical gesture of provocation on the part of a provocateur”, after which the guard forcibly removed Ion Ceban from the hall.
Perchun speaks about the alternativeness of the reform
On the other hand, Education and Research Minister Dan Perciun strongly rejected the need for a referendum, saying that the reality on the ground clearly demonstrates the failure of municipal management over the past six years. The official blamed the mayor’s office for the ineffective management of overcrowded classrooms, the lack of a plan to combat overcrowding and the fact that parents have been kept in a state of constant uncertainty regarding the funding of after-school groups.
“For the system, reform will mean greater coordination between the Ministry of Education’s policies and what happens in schools day to day: de-bureaucratization, increased school autonomy, proper integration of children with special educational needs, combating informal payments, and depoliticization of educational institutions. For principals, reform will bring more autonomy, genuine respect and clarity of work. For students and parents, it will be a chance for more coherent school management, with more investment, more transparent decisions and quicker remediation of obvious problems,” said the Minister.
The financial underside of the reform
As Logos Press previously wrote, the reform of the education system envisages the transfer of local education departments to the direct subordination of the Ministry of Education and Research. In this context, the government proposes to reduce the share of deductions from personal income tax, which remains in the budgets of Chisinau and Balti municipalities, from 50% to 45% of the total collection.
At the same time, the amendments to the law on local public finances foresee the reduction of the share of the fund of financial support for administrative-territorial units, used for general-purpose transfers to local authorities, from 63.9 per cent to 48.5 per cent. According to the draft, this decision will affect only the second-level local public administration authorities, for which the share of distributed funds from the financial support fund will be reduced from 29.6% to 14.6%.
