A series of amendments to regulations concerning private schools that were partly designed to ease problems for minority schools have instead made their predicament more complicated, according to representatives from the educational institutes, Hürriyet Daily News reported.
“We are not private schools. We are not receiving any payments from students who attend our schools. We do not bear the status of a ‘kolej’ [private school]. We had requested a separate law for minority schools,” Garo Paylan, an administrator from the Yeşilköy Armenian School in Istanbul, recently told the HDN.
Regulations concerning private schools in Turkey and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne allow only Turkish citizens to attend minority schools. A clause stipulating that only the children of Turkish citizens can attend their own minority community’s schools, however, was scrapped in new regulations that appeared in the Official Gazette on March 20, leading to perplexity among many educators.
The children of Armenian immigrants still continue attending schools under the status of “guest students,” Paylan said, adding that nothing had changed thus far.
Students from Armenia cannot attend Rum (Anatolian Greek) schools in Istanbul because they are illegal immigrants, and the children of Greek citizens cannot attend them because they are not Turkish citizens, Mihail Vasiliadis, the chief editor of Greek-language daily Apoyevmatini, said.
“The right to education is enshrined in international treaties. Children’s rights are universal. They ought to be under the protection of states whether they are illegal immigrants or citizens,” Vasiliadis said.
