Currently, the network of preschool education institutions includes 11,804 kindergartens. At the same time, according to the Ministry of Education and Science, only 8,181 kindergartens have shelters.
‘Every year we ask for a subvention for their construction. Last year, they gave us money only for schools,' Deputy Minister of Education and Science Anastasiya Konovalova said in an interview with LB.ua.
She explains why this issue is problematic. ‘If you do it for a school, you dig a hole in the ground and put money there for about a thousand and a half children. And if you dig a hole in a kindergarten, only a little smaller, you spend at least $200,000 for 150 children. And you also have kindergartens that are constantly shrinking,’ she says.
A way out of this situation could be for kindergartens to create their own pre-school units on the basis of institutions with shelters.
‘If you have a shelter in the library, create a preschool unit there, if you have a university facility, do it there. The new law on preschool education, and this is actually the state's policy, says that the service should go to the child. The hromada can open preschool units of any type not only at libraries, schools or universities, but also at enterprises, at some business,' says Anastasiya Konovalova.
She emphasises that a kindergarten can now have different types depending on the situation in the community: a nursery, a kindergarten, a mini-garden operating as a unit somewhere, or a mobile kindergarten.