The crime of Armenia’s so-called “special needs” boarding schools exposed…

It doesn't seem to matter to the staff that the 12-year old child isn't disabled. All the school requires, the Director says, is a medical certificate.

With almost non-existent salaries in the country's medical sector, many doctors readily provide fake diagnoses to parents wishing to enrol their children into residential institutions.

Dennis Loze, Project co-ordinator for the Danish health outfit, Mission East's “Mosaic Program” in Armenia, says 85 per cent of children residing in auxiliary boarding schools have been falsely diagnosed as being disabled.

"They are accepting children with no problems whatsoever because parents cannot afford to clothe and feed them," he says.

Mr Loze adds his organisation has had to literally fight to have three children with Down's Syndrome admitted into one boarding school after being told by the director that she now only accommodates "normal" children.

Suspicions that this was not incorrect were later confirmed by the Ministry of Education and Science.

So serious is the problem that the Armenian Government has decided to address the issue in a national program of actions targeted towards the protection of children's rights, including reform of the admission system.

"With the declining level of services in residential institutions, the current trend is creating an underclass of children marked by poverty, stigmatisation and a lack of proper care and education who are likely to lack opportunity as adults," noted Aleksandra Posarac and Jjalte Sederlof in the World Bank's Armenian Child Welfare Note for June 2002.

"To the extent that such children end up in institutions for the mentally disabled, which offer only a special education syllabus for children with mental disability."

The authors conclude: "their development will be seriously hampered by a lack of educational opportunities."

Poverty

Boarding schools were established during the Soviet era for children with developmental, physical and emotional disabilities.

While a 1985 Soviet decree permitted the admission of children from vulnerable families into secondary boarding schools, auxiliary boarding schools were only meant to cater for children with specific medical or psychological needs.

But, with a sizeable proportion of the population living below the poverty line, many families are increasingly looking to residential institutions to provide what the First Deputy Minister of Social Security, Ashot Yesayan, calls: "the primary 'social safety-net' for their children" in a report to be published by Family Support America in 2004.

Official statistics report that 55 per cent of Armenians live below the national poverty level - 23 per cent of whom live in extreme poverty - but according to the ARKA Financial and Economic News Agency in Yerevan, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) puts this figure at over 80 per cent if the international measure for social vulnerability is applied.

"Children are removed from their families as the only alternative to remaining hungry," says Nicholas McCoy, the report's author.

"Even if that means committing them to a residential institution or sending them out to work, research shows that vulnerable children are not necessarily the victims of earthquake and war but that they come primarily from economically deprived families."

As a result, 12,000 children now live in residential care in Armenia, according to the United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Bank.

However, because many schools compensate for shortfalls in funding from the state budget by inflating figures for the number of children enrolled, official statistics should perhaps be treated with some caution.

Vulnerable families

"The main reason for this phenomenon is poverty," says Loze.

"As a result, children that should be enrolled into auxiliary boarding schools remain outside the educational system."

And, because salaries are low, there are few incentives for specially trained teachers to take up positions in schools that are meant to cater for children with special needs.

Many boarding schools instead teach a curriculum designed for children with learning disabilities to those with no handicap at all.

Yet, despite this, the Armenian Prime Minister, Andranik Markarian, reported to the recent United Nations Earth Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg that there had been a 32 per cent rise in the number of children admitted into boarding schools since 1991.

"One mother visiting her son at a boarding school in Yerevan described her frustration when she couldn't find work following the death of her husband during the [Karabagh] war and the anger she felt when her son had to be enrolled into a school designated for mentally handicapped children," says McCoy.

"She wasn't happy with the "watered-down" education he was receiving and said that if she had the means she would have taken him back years ago."

"During the Soviet era," he continues, "children enrolled into residential institutions were looked upon as second-class citizens.

This discouraged families from placing their children into boarding schools and children's homes but in today's Armenia, this mentality has changed.

Many boarding school directors now report that there is actually a waiting list for children to be admitted because of the present-day economic uncertainty."

However, while children's homes in Armenia have received substantial support from the large Armenian Diaspora, conditions in over fifty boarding schools have deteriorated considerably since independence.

One director is believed to keep conditions as bad as possible in order to attract extra finance from international organisations working in the republic; money the children there will never see.

"Mission East has stopped dealing with this director completely because we understand there is a greater incentive for him to keep conditions as they are," says Loze.

"Whatever resources directed to him will simply disappear."

But Naira Avetisyan, UNICEF's Child Protection Officer, is quick to point out that the staff at most boarding schools and children's homes in Armenia are genuinely concerned with the well-being of those entrusted into their care.

"However," she adds, "the importance of strengthening vulnerable families by providing them with job opportunities has to be empathised rather than just supporting the institutions."

With few exceptions, conditions in Armenia's boarding schools are poor, with international organisations having to operate feeding programs in some schools so the children receive basic nutrition.

The Armenian Relief Society (ARS) operates three such feeding programs in Yerevan alone, but for the most part, children remain undernourished.

"This can easily be observed in the faces and stature of most of these children," says McCoy.

"They are noticeably thin, have drawn faces and many are stunted in growth and are too small for their age. At the majority of boarding schools, the diet consists mainly of carbohydrates such as pasta, potatoes and bread while few can afford to serve fruit, vegetables or meat."


Single parents

Since Armenia declared independence from the former-Soviet Union in 1991, socio-economic conditions in the republic have deteriorated.

Even with recent economic growth, a combination of factors such as an unresolved war with Azerbaijan, economic blockade by Turkey, endemic corruption and increasing social inequality has led to the economic migration of at least one million Armenians.

And, despite the common misconception that most children placed into residential care in Armenia are orphans, few are abandoned or available for adoption.

According to Avetisyan, even in children's homes (commonly referred to as "orphanages" in the Diaspora) at least 70 per cent have families they could return to if the socio-economic situation improved.

Many children instead come from single-parent households where the mother is divorced, widowed or separated from a husband working abroad or in prison.

A demographic and health survey held in 2000 estimates that 110,000 children in Armenia come from single-parent families out of approximately 500,000 children believed to be living in poverty.

"There are many reasons why children with parents are deprived of parental care in Armenia," explains Avetisyan.

"First of all there is poverty, then centralisation of special education within the boarding school system and finally, the absence of alternatives and community-based support services for vulnerable families at risk."

"The majority of children in children's homes and boarding schools are not orphans," she continues.

"They have parents and the right to live with their families."

But, while some organisations conclude that Armenia's Boarding schools should be closed, such plans could create additional problems unless the root cause of the problem is addressed.

UNICEF and the Armenian Ministry of the Interior estimate that there are as many as 400 children street children in Yerevan and numbers could increase if others are removed from care and effectively thrown onto the streets.

Susanna Hayrapetyan, Social Sector Operations Offer for the World Bank's Office in Yerevan, says that the international financial organisation favours a "phased approach" as part of the Armenian Government's overall Poverty Reduction Strategy.

"It can't happen overnight," she explains. "It needs special consideration and a transition phase of at least a year-and-a-half."

As a result, in a wide-ranging 10-year National Program for the Protection of Children's Rights in Armenia, the Armenian Government and NGOs working in this area are now proposing measures to prevent the enrolment of non-disabled children into boarding schools and the return of those already in residential institutions to their families.

"It is extremely difficult to measure the impact that removing a child from their home environment has," says McCoy.

"And, although it is too early to substantiate claims that the wellbeing of children placed in residential care will be affected, it may very well take an entire generation before we fully understand the social and psychological ramifications of this phenomenon."

"However," he concludes, "institutionalising children only perpetuates the problem of social vulnerability in Armenia by seriously undermining the development of programs that could support the family and keep children out of institutions."