Prague, April 18 (CTK) – The Czech government on Wednesday decided to increase the 2018 budget of private and church schools by 131 million crowns so that the pay of their teachers may be raised in a similar way as the salaries of state-run school teachers, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Brabec (ANO) told journalists.
Private schools will get 101 million and church schools 30 million crowns.
The budget increase was proposed by Education Minister Robert Plaga and the money will be taken from the government’s reserve in the state budget, Brabec said.
The pay of teachers in state-run schools was increased by 15 percent in November 2017.
According to the Education Ministry, the increase in the salaries of teachers from private and church schools could not have been included in the state budget for this year because the previous government decided to give additional money for teachers’ pay to the state-run schools on the day on which it was approving the state budget.
The parliament later rejected a proposal for a change in the 2018 state budget under which the non-state schools would have received finances for the increase in salaries.
Last December, representatives of private and church schools addressed Prime Minister Andrej Babis (ANO) with a request for the missing finances. They also said the different financing of public and non-public schools was unfair.
Babis previously criticised state contributions for non-state schools. The Education Ministry subsidises these schools with about 6.5 billion crowns a year. Schools run by regional authorities have a budget of around 120 billion crowns this year.
According to the ministry’s data, there are about 1060 kindergartens, elementary and secondary schools and colleges operated by churches or private owners in the Czech Republic and they employ some 13,800 teachers. In total, there are approximately 156,000 teachers in the country.
