Ministry Wins Spat over School Language Exemptions
The Ministry of Education can take its own sweet time in deciding whether to grant Russian-language high schools exemptions to the mandatory shift to a 60 percent Estonian curriculum, the Tallinn Administrative Court has ruled.
The court dismissed a complaint brought by the City of Tallinn which said that the ministry should have made its decisions on exemptions by September 1, the start of the school year.
In making its ruling, the court said the issue was too important and would affect too many people for the Ministry of Education to be rushed into a decision, according to a ministry press release.
The law mandates that, from this year, all tenth-graders entering Russian-language upper-secondary schools receive at least 60 percent of their instruction in Estonian over the course of their final three school years.
Many schools, however, have said that neither their staff nor students are ready for the change and 17 schools in Tallinn and Narva have applied for either extensions or outright exemptions from the requirement.
The Ministry of Education has so far only granted two Russian-curriculum schools, both designated for adults, extensions on their transition, leading municipal authorities in Tallinn and Narva to complain over what they say is procrastination on the issue.
Steve Roman