About 70 percent of Roma students did not take part in any form of distance learning after schools were closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the non-governmental organization eduRoma that cites a survey among social services providers working in more than 140 excluded communities in the Košice, Prešov, Banská Bystrica, Nitra and Bratislava regions. About 60 percent of them are secondary school students. In some communities in Eastern Slovakia, 90 to 100 percent of pupils did not participate in education during the crisis. On the other hand, some of the students from Roma communities were interested in distance learning , despite the fact that they did not have the necessary technical equipment such as computers for online learning.
The involvement of Roma pupils in distance education during a pandemic presupposes maintaining regular contact with the teacher but 60 percent of them did not or rarely had such contacts. "We learnt from the testimonies of social workers that the teachers themselves refused to go to the Roma communities, and since many schools lack teaching assistants and there are no field, social or community workers in some localities, there was nobody to carry worksheets," says eduRoma. Other main reasons for not participating in distance education are the regulations of the Ministry of Education, which decided students should not be marked during distance education, that nobody would repeat a year and that returning to school in June was voluntary.
