Fines for school absences without a serious reason: 1,000 lei in Romania, hundreds of euros in other countries

The police have the right to prosecute parents and issue fines. The fact that plane tickets and accommodation are cheaper outside of the holidays is no good reason to miss school.

The fact that plane tickets and accommodation are cheaper during the school year is not a good reason to miss school. Abroad, parents pay stinging fines for such absences.

Police in Romania are taking the first steps towards implementing the law that allows them to fine parents whose children are absent from school without good reason. Although the law has been in place for many years, the only punishments so far for school absences have been students, by lowering their grades. Things are not the same in other countries, where parents receive fines of hundreds of euros if they decide to go on holiday outside of school holidays and are even turned away from the airport if they cannot justify the urgency of traveling with the child.

In the spring of 2022, public opinion in Romania was shocked by the fact that a Romanian family was questioned by the Police, at an airport in Germany, regarding the child’s absence from school. The information was erroneously presented by several publications, which wrote then that the German police alerted the authorities in Romania so that the family would be fined. The truth, later presented by edupedu.ro, was that the Romanian family lived in Germany, the children studied there, and the police notified the school authority to fine the family.

For many countries in Europe, and not only, such a situation represents normality: children can be absent from school only in justified situations (illness, special events or various emergencies). If parents take them out of school to go on holidays during school, when accommodation and flights are cheaper, they get fined.

In Romania, in a school year, children have the right to 40 hours of leave, for reasons other than medical ones. The maximum number of admissions cannot exceed 20% of the number of hours allocated to a discipline.

The first step before the fine: the notification

The law provides for the application of fines if a child is absent more than once, but so far, everything has remained at the level of theory. However, a first step was taken in the spring of 2023 in Arad, where dozens of parents received notices that they would be fined up to 1,000 lei for the unjustified absences of their children. A similar initiative was registered in Craiova, also at the beginning of 2023, where the Local Police sent an address to schools informing them that it is empowered to apply fines to families that do not ensure the school attendance of children enrolled in compulsory education.

Clear law, crooked application

The reality is that, in Romania, the concern of the authorities is more about school dropouts in disadvantaged communities, and not occasional absences. We have one of the highest dropout rates in the European Union (15.6%), the main cause being poverty, doubled by some families’ disinterest in education, as well as the lack of effective measures by the Romanian state to fight concretely with this problem.

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