Long consigned to lower-quality schools, Roma in two Czech communities are doing well in mainstream schools thanks to innovative reforms and local political support. From Okraj.
Simona took her daughter Ester to the Informal Preschool Center for the first time in mid-September. While Mom filled out the enrollment papers, the almost two-year-old girl shyly watched the other children, four of them, making color-by-number drawings at a table in the cozy surroundings at the Chaloupka Family and Community Center in downtown Ostrava.
This informal facility operates more or less like any children’s group. Two staff members, 12 kids, and a speech therapist who drops by a few times every week.
“Preschoolers from well-off majority families come here, and so do Roma children,” social worker Aneta Sucha says.
Inclusion in a group like this is important for the Roma kids. When they soon enter the formal education system, they’ll be able to tackle some of the obstacles that arise from being born into what are often socially disadvantaged surroundings.
Aneta Sucha knows this. Although she and her family lived in what in Czech is termed an “excluded locality”in the Hrusov district of Ostrava, the Czech Republic’s third-largest city, she graduated in social pedagogy at Masaryk University in Brno, and at the age of 33 she’s giving back, helping Roma children experience the same supportive environment that she benefited from.
“They see what I achieved, how my life changed for the better, and that they can do this too,” she says. She means the path out of life in the closedcircleof poverty.
The Meaning of Desegregation
When she thinks back over her journey through the school system, Sucha sees support from teachers and fellow students as a crucial factor, no less so than the overall educational setting. “I had fellow students from the majority,” she explains – from preschool to elementary and high school.
It was her mother’s enlightened choice not to send her to the nearest, segregated, school.
“She herself ended up in a segregated special school and she was determined that my brother and I should never go through what she did,” Sucha continues. Education without segregation has positively influenced her entire life.
[Czech “special schools” are by law designed to educate children with a range of physical and intellectual handicaps and learning disabilities. The high over-representation of Roma in these schools is evidence of systemic discrimination, according to rights groups – Transitions note.]
Her story may not be exceptional among educated Roma, but it is not common in the community as a whole. The Education Ministry estimates that more than 40% of Roma children in Ostrava and the entire Moravian-Silesian region, more than 3,000 pupils, complete their compulsory schooling at segregated elementary schools – those where Roma make up one-third or more of the total student body.
Isolating Roma children in single classrooms or entire schools brings social, educational, and economic consequences. “Children who attend these schools often don’t continue into high school, they can’t find work, grow dependent on social benefits and so forth. Segregated education costs municipalities money and leads to destabilization and stagnation of Roma families, towns, and society,” contends Karel Gargulak, an education expert at the PAQ Research analysis firm.
Schools themselves carry the burden of all this, as pupils often score low on tests, or even fail to complete the nine years of mandatory schooling, while early-career teachers often quit soon after taking jobs there.
Aneta Sucha herself left a segregated elementary school after just two months working as a teaching assistant.
“Fifth-graders couldn’t sign their names. In eighth grade they learned how to apply for child benefits. There was zero communication with parents, and the children were totally unmotivated,” she says. Such schools have a bad reputation among Roma themselves. In her opinion, only parents who lack any interest in their children’s education enroll them in these schools.
Sucha’s bachelor’s thesis compared unsegregated and segregated elementary schools from the perspective of schoolchildren. Her child subjects said mixed schools enrich the majority children and show Roma kids how to live differently.
Money Comes First
Some municipalities in the Moravian-Silesian region have shown success in transferring Roma children from segregated to Czech-majority schools. Experts single out work in this area by the town of Krnov and the Poruba district of Ostrava, while noting that these efforts were undertaken not in a “noble cause” but primarily to save money – city halls didn’t want to keep wasting money on half-empty school buildings.
The mayor of Krnov explains what happened.
“We were forced to reduce the number of schools as a result of long-term population decline. The town managers decided to close down elementary schools where most pupils were Roma from socially excluded areas,” Tomas Hradil says.
“The Krnov authorities at the time [in 2009] were enlightened and they relocated the students to other schools by changing the school districts.” The town of more than 20,000 inhabitants now has just four elementary schools.
In Ostrava-Poruba, local authorities began looking for ways to cut costs at a mostly Roma-attended school a decade ago. In the end the decision came to allow older students to remain in the school, while around 70 first- through fifth-graders were relocated to nearby schools.
In practice, district staff redrew the boundaries of catchment areas so that no Roma child would have to travel far to their new school.
The head of Poruba’s education department, Milan Gregor recalls that the hardest part was persuading principals, teachers, and Roma parents to accept the plan. Calling it “a big struggle, which lasted half a year,” he says that the deputy mayor of the day visited local residents and reassured them that all would go well.
A Surprise Move
It’s the second day of the school year and Detska Elementary School is buzzing. Teachers have just given the smallest kids permission to go out to meet their parents, impatiently waiting to take them home, and the halls echo to the sounds of their running feet. A normal day, says school principal Zuzana Skapova, who is starting her final year in the job. Back in 2017, she accepted the highest number of Roma children from the partly shuttered school – two entire classes with around 50 pupils, and a teacher.
Skapova didn’t inform the other pupils in advance of her decision. “People can be prejudiced and I knew that it wouldn’t work out well for us if they approached it with fear and anxiety from the start.”
Her fears were justified. A government-commissioned PAQ Research study in 2019 found that majority parents were willing to accept at most four Roma children in their child’s class. More, and parents said they would place their child elsewhere.
Nothing like this happened at the Detska school, where just two pupils left, Skapova says. The entire teaching staff remained. “We have good relations among ourselves. From the beginning, I told them it would be a challenge,” she says.
There is pressure on schools, though, as district Vice Mayor Martina Duskova confirms.
“When parents of majority children learn that Roma will join their child’s class, they start enrolling them elsewhere. This is a problem for us, because the district population is falling and we have to fight for every schoolchild,” the politician says.
Aneta Sucha regards such demands from the side of parents as racist and immoral. On the other hand, she has some understanding for their feelings, saying, “It’s challenging for schools to address the significant disparities in starting points among children.”
Karel Handlir, an elementary-school principal in Krnov, knows this well. Right after being named to head the math-oriented school in 2009, the then-mayor tasked him with including about six Roma pupils from a closed segregated school in every class.
“I started teaching sixth-graders, but the Roma students who arrived were at third- or fourth-grade level,” Handlir says. “They were lagging behind in expressing themselves, and because they didn’t want to feel like the worst in the class, they started drawing attention to themselves in various ways, which led to disciplinary problems.”
It was not easy to teach the class, he admits, saying he felt he was failing and like most of his colleagues grew frustrated. He and the teaching staff then took the step of looking at the situation from the other side and seeing what how conditions at home were affecting Roma kids’ preparedness for school.
“We realized that parents who themselves went to a special school are not capable of helping their child. We saw six or eight people living in a two- or three-room flat and the children had no place to study,” Handlir says, describing the moment he recognized that the school had to take pupils’ living conditions into account.
Experts agree on the importance of learning what Roma children need.
“Closing schools and changing catchment areas is the hardest first step,” comments Gargula of PAQ Research. In his view, local authorities would do better to start by considered what problems segregation causes and then focus on the needs of families.
In School and After
Krnov and Ostrava-Poruba both took another basic step, he remarks: they involved all groups needed to address the problem – local authorities, schools, social services, Roma community leaders, and parents from the majority community.
Afterschool activities that bring together children without regard to ethnicity, from tutoring to interest groups, are another important foundation for successful desegregation, Gargula says.
A tutoring club turned out to be the most useful activity for his pupils, Handlir says. A joint venture between the school and a local nonprofit, the club met in an “excluded locality,” giving kids a place to do homework under the guidance of tutors. Social workers saw to it that children attended regularly. Eventually the clubs expanded to all schools in Krnov, for all students, not only Roma, and for preschoolers as well. Teachers met parents or visited them at home every quarter, and these informal meetings helped the school earn Roma parents’ trust, says Handlir, who was honored for his work by the Learned Society of the Czech Republic.
“We didn’t take them to task if their kids didn’t go to school. We didn’t dump a problem on them they couldn’t deal with, because they had other priorities,” Handlir says. “We took an interest in how they lived and what their concerns were, and when they saw this sincere interest, the community opened up to us.”
Krnov’s reforms were largely paid for with European funds, with the city kicking in what it could. Aside from finances, a complete approach is required for school reform, Mayor Hradil says, noting that the city hired social pedagoguesand teaching assistants and began building a social services safety net.
“Cooperation with nonprofits was crucial. Several low-barrier facilities are operating, we have debt counseling, NGOs help people find work,” he says. Dozens of people work in these organizations.
In Ostrava-Poruba, principal Skapova took a different approach. Believing that the school should behave toward its new Roma pupils exactly the same as any other child, she kept the school out of special programs for Roma. All children are invited to join school activities.
“Parents and children grew used to these rules, and they work. It goes without saying that [pupils] can come any time if they need help,” she says.
Not that the school overlooked what funding was available. The district paid for a program assistant and still partly funds specialized positions, the same as at all local elementary schools. These staff have eased Roma pupils’ inclusion, Skapova says. The district also employed two Roma fieldworkers to visit families at home when schooling issues arose.
It Works
The results of these desegregation efforts can be seen. In Krnov, to give one example, a preschool center closed because it was no longer needed when Roma parents began automatically enrolling their children in normal preschools. Handlir comments that there is now less of a gap between Roma and majority pupils when they enter first grade.
Even if all youngsters in Krnov start school with roughly the same foundation, “cultural inertia” remains very high in some families, Handlir says, adding that much work remains to be done. “They have lower ambitions, and this influences their decisions about their children.”
He sees evidence of the importance of continuous work with children in the academic records of two local children whose families temporarily moved to a nearby town when they lost their housing in Krnov. “We had worked with them from preschool age until the third grade. After three years in a segregated school [when they returned] they couldn’t keep up, even though they showed potential. They lost confidence in themselves.”
“We’re seeing real improvements in results of all children, which is the best argument for desegregation,” Gargula comments. From her experience, Poruba Vice Mayor Duskova says that politicians, above all, must have confidence in desegregation.
“Because the moment they give up on it, a segregated school affects a community’s entire education system,” she says.
Her colleague in Krnov says he has observed that teaching all children together helps bring majority and Roma communities closer. He mentions cultural events where locals come together to watch Roma performers. “No one feels uncomfortable and people aren’t clutching their purses like they used to.” Even if coexistence isn’t always perfect, he sees definite progress. Signs of this are wider acceptance of Roma in the job market, as restaurant cooks, for instance, or when parents chat amiably at school activities rather than ignoring each other.
Another signal of the success of desegregation is the rising number of Roma who enroll in high school. Nine Roma pupils applied to academic high schools or trade schools from the Detska school in 2024, three more than the previous year.
Local Variations
At the start of our interview in Krnov city hall, Mayor Hradil notes that desegregation strategies elsewhere will by necessity differ from the experience of Krnov, a smaller city with several elementary schools, a variety of housing options, and a developed social service network.
Other Czech communities that adopted desegregation plans failed to see them through, Gargulak says, mentioning too little engagement with families as one factor. In Ostrava-Poruba, officials learned to be flexible in drawing catchment area boundaries to adapt to changes in the housing market, as for instance when families from rundown neighborhoods moved to more attractive housing in buildings managed by one of the country’s biggest property owners.
The school that increased its intake of Roma children from these neighborhoods also makes space for children with no fixed address or those living in asylum homes, usually around 16 per year, Duskova says, saying this could be a “potential risk factor” that no one school should have to bear. The Poruba district handled this by dividing these groups of pupils between two schools – showing that long-term commitment to dealing with such issues is mandatory if segregation is not to make a comeback, despite the progress so far.
Whether desegregation fails or succeeds depends on political will. Gargulak observes that desegregation in Czechia didn’t get off the ground for the sake of children and their future prospects. It depends on whether politicians want it, or not: “And the issue of Roma education is sensitive and unpopular.”
Simona Janikova reported for the leading Czech economic daily Hospodarske noviny and other business publications before joining the Ostrava-based local news startup Okraj, where this article originally appeared in Czech. She received a Council of Europe Journalism Excellence award in 2025 for her interview with a Roma activist about school segregation.
This article received support from Journalismfund Europe and from Transitions’ solutions journalism mentoring program.
