For one-day student excursions, schools and kindergartens will have to notify in advance the Regional Departments of Education, the Executive Agency "Automobile Administration" and the "Traffic Police" sector of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
This is one of the proposed changes by MES to Regulation No. 10 on the organization of activities in school education, published for public discussion. The goal is to ensure the safety of life and health of children and students, including during short trips.
No later than 24 hours before the start of the trip, the director of the school or kindergarten will have to notify the heads of the relevant institutions, indicating the route of the trip, starting point, date and time of departure, expected time of arrival at the final destination, time and meeting point for departure from the final destination, expected time of arrival, duration of stay. Information about the concluded contract and data about the carrier company must also be provided when the trip is carried out by occasional bus transportation, and in cases of transportation at one's own expense - and the order of the director of the institution.
Currently, the regulatory framework related to road safety during organized trips is set out in various acts - The Road Transport Act, the Tourism Act, Regulation No. 33 of the Minister of Transport and a special regulation of the Tourism Act. For one-day trips, which are organized only with the sanction of directors, there was so far no explicit requirement to notify the responsible institutions that have control functions for pre-trip inspections. This was required only for longer organized trips with overnight stays. The lack of regulatory regulation for one-day excursions created prerequisites for increased risk to the life and health of children and students, as well as administrative incompatibility between the different types of organized transportation. The lack of a clear order also makes it difficult to exercise effective control by the competent institutions – including the Executive Agency “Automobile Administration“ and the Ministry of Interior.
Other amendments to the same regulation regulate that in order to be called a “vacation“ a certain period in the school schedule, it should include two or more days for rest. This does not mean that students will be deprived of rest between terms or around November 1, but in these cases the days will be declared non-school days, not vacation days. In this regard, there are new texts, according to which the end of the first school term should be the day that coincides with the last working day of the week. During the school year, students have Christmas, spring and summer vacations. For a certain school year, the Minister of Education and Science may determine the use of autumn and/or mid-term vacations by order.
There will now also be a possibility of canceling maturity papers with identical texts, as a prevention against copying, when the tasks require the creation of an independent answer. These are cases in which in separate exam papers they completely or almost completely coincide – in structure, answers, wording or solutions – to an extent that excludes the possibility of independent preparation. The purpose of the change is to guarantee equality in the assessment of state matriculation exams by limiting the possibility of students receiving a grade based on copied or mechanically reproduced texts, thereby protecting the effort of those who put in real work.