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Boarding school, not life
Olga Allenova has been visiting boarding schools for children with developmental disabilities (IDD) and psychoneurological boarding schools for adults (PNI) for many years. She is there as a volunteer or with representatives of non-profit organizations that solve problems and achieve reforms in work formats. To understand, it is enough to look at the photos she took and listen to her stories. Currently, Russian boarding schools for 200-500 people do not have decent living conditions for people.
Next year marks the 10th anniversary of the reform of orphanages and boarding schools in Russia. It began in 2015. It all started with the discovery that children were so traumatized that they could not lead a normal life, leaving orphanages and quickly finding themselves trapped in a non-social environment. State institutions have been implementing this reform for a long time. A study of international experience shows that in small groups with one full-time teacher (a close adult), children feel safer and develop better physically, mentally and intellectually. Shelters, orphanages and boarding schools must now meet the standards of family-type institutions. This means that a group should not exceed 6-7 people, and they should be looked after by one senior teacher, a close adult.
Although the reform was somewhat successful in orphanages, it was not entirely successful in most boarding schools for children with special needs. The reason is quite trivial.
In such institutions in Russia there is a shortage of personnel, especially junior ones, i.e. nurses or nannies. Teachers work in shifts. That is, children in the group do not have permanent adults, they change.
And in many places the groups grew to nine or more. However, it was known that it was very difficult to maintain a family atmosphere at that time.
When visiting different areas, I often saw that the beds in the dormitories of the boarding school were close to each other and cramped. And in some places, two groups were combined into one room to make the work of the staff easier. In boarding schools for special children, it is often impossible to create a family atmosphere.
The personnel problems are mainly related to the fact that boarding schools for both children and adults are usually located in rural areas, far from regional centers. In Soviet times, they were specially built so that ordinary citizens could not see special people.
And locals go there to work without the necessary training and motivation, except for the understanding that the profession of a nurse or a nurse does not require special education. And it is these adults who spend most of their lives with children.
At the boarding school I saw sincere, kind and caring staff, but I also saw indifferent and cruel staff. There is no system for selecting these people.
Also, due to staff turnover, everyone is employed there. Therefore, junior staff often do not know how to occupy children, develop them, play with them and make their life satisfying. But it is difficult to blame them for this. They often devote all their strength and health to work and perform tasks for several people.
However, it is obvious that it is necessary to increase the requirements for recruiting employees, on the one hand, and to increase the salaries of those who work directly with children, on the other.
A separate issue concerns the staffing of groups in boarding schools. State institutions advocated for the reform of orphanages, citing foreign family-type orphanages as an example and arguing that children with different levels of physical and mental development should live in groups. For example, in a group of 7 or 8 people, if 5 eat alone and 2 do not, the staff can cope more easily, and the more developed children can help and care for the weaker children.
However, in Russia, in boarding schools for special children, there are mercy departments where they literally “throw” all those with limited mobility, weak, and often unable to speak.
As a rule, only nurses or nurses look after them. Teachers appear in the wards of mercy very rarely. Children lie like logs on a bed with high sides, and no educational work is carried out.
And the nanny is obliged to get all the children out of bed at least once a day and put them in strollers, but with interest it develops better, since when changing the position from horizontal to vertical the child begins to look at the world from a different angle, but this does not happen. If the nanny pulled all the children out of bed, she would break her back, because they are so heavy. And there will be no one to work. Therefore, children in such institutions rarely get out of bed, and this incapacitates them even more.
One organization showed a girl happily studying a toy. But after 10 minutes I got tired and started shouting. "She doesn't like getting out of bed," the employee explained. It turned out that the girl got out of bed and changed her clothes before the authorities arrived. And if you teach your child for 10 minutes a day, gradually increasing the time, in a year your child will be able to easily get out of bed and concentrate on the game.
Many children attending boarding schools have parents whose rights are not taken away or even limited. However, because adults are unable to care for their children, the children end up within the walls of state institutions. They work, raise other children...
A solution to the problem of returning these children to their families may be the so-called permanent replacement of families living in the place of residence. Examples include child care groups such as kindergartens, volunteer classes in special schools with tutors, and nannies who come for a few hours a day. However, there are boarding schools, although there are no services. Today, as in Soviet times, boarding schools in Russia are considered a social service for parents.
Do parents have the opportunity to see the conditions in which their children live in boarding schools? No, this does not happen in groups or in the bedroom. Meetings with children are allowed in a special visiting room, but staying there for a long time is prohibited.
Even in relatively good boarding schools, which, given the shortage of staff, have an accessible and caring environment and get children out of bed, they still spend most of their time completely alone. Within the group, he gets as much personal attention as he needs. But all children need tactile contact with adults nearby. We all hug our children, stroke their hair, massage their feet before bed, and draw letters on their backs. In boarding schools, children do not have and will never have all of these things. They do not know what the warmth of a loved one is.
And even individual contact with adults often occurs only when a child is undergoing a procedure, visiting a psychologist, or being examined by a doctor. At one local boarding school, staff were told they needed to enter information in a special log about who picked up children from a group and when they returned them to the group. “Ivanova’s staff picked up Olya B. from the group at 11:15 for exercise therapy. At 12 o’clock, Petrova’s staff took Olya B., who was undergoing exercise therapy, to a speech therapist. Sidorova’s staff picked up Olya B. from the speech therapist at 12:30 and took her to the group.”
The boarding school management does not want to take responsibility when the girl is taken out of the high bed, so a report on the movement of one child within the institution must be written by three adults. According to the law, it is she who plays the role of the parent of the orphan Olya.
There is no respect for individuals in the residential care system and people living in this system are treated as mere objects of care. This is evidenced by the lack of personal space, bathrooms without partitions, rooms without doors, being without personal belongings.
I still see all this often in boarding schools for children and adults with special needs or disabilities.
When I travel, I often ask agency employees: “Do you want to live in conditions where you have to go to the toilet in front of other people, sleep in a room of 8 or 9 people and spend much of your time staring at the ceiling? “Life?” “No, of course not,” they answer.
However, children and adults in such boarding schools still share underwear, T-shirts and socks, and after washing Vanya might get Dima's pajamas, and Dima might get Vanya's underwear. Last year, in some places, we were taught to label things, but when we looked through the closets, we found that personal belongings were usually only owned by the most protected children and adults. A person who has committed a serious violation is deprived of both dignity and subjectivity.
When visiting child care facilities, government officials often see new toothbrushes and untouched tubes of toothpaste in the toilets and bathrooms. This means that children are not brushing their teeth.
This is not surprising if there are one or two employees in a group of nine children. After all, the employees have to change the children's diapers in the morning, wash them (to avoid characteristic odors) and feed them - four times a day. There is neither time nor energy left for brushing teeth. In addition, brushing your child's teeth requires calming him down, holding him in your arms and preparing him. Since this is a very intimate procedure, it cannot be rushed.
As a result, many people in boarding schools, both children and adults, often have rotten teeth or no teeth at all.
In one institution they saw a child whose teeth were not visible because of a thick layer of tartar. Many of the boarding school's pupils suffer from toothache. And they get used to constant pain: groans, screams, lying curled up in a ball. And sometimes he can't even explain to them what's wrong.
Although boarding schools provide dental care, the reality is that the doctors work for only a quarter of their salary. And dentists in your area often don’t know how to care for children and adults with special needs. These children are often told that they need dental treatment under anesthesia, but there are no anesthesiologists in the boarding schools. The real solution is to transport people in need to local or city dental clinics, to doctors with the necessary qualifications. However, here too there are problems with staffing and a lack of transportation for institutions located in remote areas.
According to the law, a boarding school is a social welfare institution similar to a dormitory for the mentally retarded. In other words, it is a home. And at home, a person can have an animal, a companion. However, the PNI generally prohibits this, citing unsanitary conditions.
There are exceptions. So, I spoke to a girl who has spent her entire life in a boarding school. First, she was in an orphanage, and now she is in a psychiatric hospital. She is sociable and hardworking. She works in the laundry room of the boarding school, but she cannot go outside because she was deprived of legal capacity as a child. Judicial practice in Russia makes the restoration of legal capacity very difficult and almost impossible for orphans in PNI. However, the girl was allowed to keep her cat for good behavior. The cat brought her kittens, but they were no longer able to enter the boarding school. Now the girl secretly feeds the kittens and opens the window when the staff is not there.
The fact that women work is also a big exception. The only entertainment for most residents of the PNI is watching TV in the hall. And there is always a crowd around it.
A necessary part of normalizing life in boarding schools is the creation of craft workshops and employment agencies. However, this is not done everywhere. What saved me was the opportunity to engage in agriculture, gardening and growing flowers.
This happens because when there are not enough jobs, people lose interest in life and become depressed or, conversely, aggressive.
They are then quarantined in an observatory with other offenders. These wards usually have 10-12 beds and are locked from the outside. The person is deprived of the most basic necessities and can remain there for months due to bad behavior or quarrels with the staff.
Children and adults are locked up not only as a punishment, but also when they return home and are forced to quarantine or catch a cold.
With such an introduction, there is no point in talking about allowing people to leave boarding schools.
Boarding schools are located behind high fences that hide what is happening inside from the rest of the world. There are many people in a boarding school who have never crossed this barrier.
Even today, this artifact hinders the creation of an inclusive society where people with special needs can appear on the streets and in public places.
However, many residents of PNI would like to see life in the fresh air. One PNI said that I can go to the bathhouse once a week, but at my own expense. For this, each person pays 1,000 rubles a month. If you know that 75% of the disability pension is taken by the boarding school, and the person receives only 25%, that is, about 3,000 rubles, then it becomes clear how large the sum of 1,000 rubles is. But for the unique opportunity to go outside the PNI and experience a real adventure, people are ready to pay from their meager incomes.
In European countries, only a few boarding schools remain behind fences, they are dismantled and turned into small family homes integrated into society. This is the only way to humanize such a system.