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International Journal of
Inclusive Education
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Inclusive education in
Romania: policies and practices
in post‐Communist Romania
a
Gabriela Walker
a
Educational Policy Studies Department , University of Illinois
at Urbana‐Champaign , Champaign, IL, USA
Published online: 22 Sep 2009.

To cite this article: Gabriela Walker (2010) Inclusive education in Romania: policies and practices in
post‐Communist Romania, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 14:2, 165-181, DOI:
10.1080/13603110802504192
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 International Journal of Inclusive Education
Vol. 14, No. 2, March 2010, 165–181

Inclusive education in Romania: policies and practices in

post-Communist Romania
Gabriela Walker*

Educational Policy Studies Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

Champaign, IL, USA
(Received 13 May 2008; final revision received 15 July 2008)
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This paper discusses current inclusive education policies and practices in

Romania. There are few accounts of and no systematic study published on this
topic. The Romanian special educational policies began to evolve towards
integration and inclusion. Today, Romanian special education functions
according to democratic principles and Romanian specialists are currently
working for solutions to inclusion by adapting regular school services to the
needs of the students and the specifics of the current educational system. Today
there is still a series of obstacles to the development of special education to the
standards of developed countries with a tradition in educating learners with
unique abilities.
Keywords: Romania; special education; inclusive education; disability;
inclusiveness; integration; street children; Roma (Romani)

Introduction
This paper presents an overview of Romanian policies and practices pertaining to
inclusive education. These descriptions and discussions about characteristics and
areas of need in the Romanian special education system are intended to serve as
guidelines of reference for the development of special education in Romania, as an
opportunity to notice the weak links, and as improvement suggestions. This survey
could be of interest to international scholars from various disciplines, to students
focusing on special education, to persons with disabilities themselves, and to special
needs advocacy groups. It may suggest new directions for research, for both public
and educational policy changes that could improve the lives and social participation
of people with disabilities.
The author is unaware of any recently written surveys about the status of
inclusive education of children with special needs in Romania. To supplement a
literature review on this topic, the author uses her own observations as a Romanian,
as a US resident, as a special education teacher in both Romania and the US, and as a
scientist who has completed twelve years of tertiary specialised education in
disability studies in both Romania and the US. In addition, the author contributes
with data from her Master’s thesis research.

*Email: gwalker4@uiuc.edu

ISSN 1360-3116 print/ISSN 1464-5173 online

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13603110802504192
http://www.informaworld.com
 166 G. Walker

This paper comprises the current conceptual framework of special education

terms used in Romania; a brief information about the author and the target country; a
methodology that sets out the various ways that were used to put together the limited
information available on the development of special education in Romania; descrip-
tions of Romania’s inclusive education history, relevant policies and practices in
Romania during Communism, the democratic transition, and European Union
membership; a description of the social phenomena of street children and minority-
overrepresentation in special education, as negative legacies of the Communist
regime and as an obstacle to inclusive education and to the rights of children; and a
section with conclusions and recommendations.

Conceptual framework of special education and types of disabilities in Romania

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In general, ‘special education’ means modified or adapted instruction that meets the
particular needs of students with unusual learning requirements. These students
might have autism spectrum disorders, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities,
atten-tion deficit hyperactivity disorder, emotional or behavioural disorders,
communica-tion disorders, deafness, blindness, traumatic brain injury, physical
disabilities, or giftedness. In Romania, special education exists for children with
deficiencies and disabilities in order to prepare and integrate them into society (Verza
1995; Education Encylcopedia 2008). As in the United States, there is a special
education network that provides specialised services at various levels of schooling,
from kindergarten to post-high school education.
The current review looks at the role of special education in the following catego-
ries in both the US, and Romania:

● Mental retardation (MR) or intellectual disabilities (ID).

● Learning disabilities (LD).
● Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or pervasive disintegrative disorders (PDD).
● Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
● Emotional or behavioural disorders (EBD).

However, not all of these conditions constitute a disability category in Romania, and
some are defined differently. This is because special education or psycho-pedagogy,
as it is called in Romania, explains some of these conditions mainly using a
psychological rather than a behavioural approach. For example, in Roma-nia all
children with learning difficulties or problems that impede accomplish-ments of
abilities through learning are considered to have LD. ADHD is considered to be more
of a correctable or educable behavioural problem resulting from insufficient
discipline. EBD constitutes a separate entity and it is described as a set of
disturbances (in the internal plan of the subjective experiences and in the external
plan of the manifestations of the subjective emotions) during the develop-ment of the
individual’s behaviour and personality (Verza 1995). Because there are no
established eligibility criteria and categories for ASD, EBD, ADD/ADHD, and LD,
there are no specialised services for students that may display such behav-ioural
characteristics. Children with these types of impairments are very likely to be
included in a general public education programme, particularly those students with
an average IQ (e.g. high-functioning ASD, Asperger’s syndrome, ADD/ ADHD, and
EBD). Other students with LD, low-functioning ASD, and possibly
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 167

EBD would be assigned to special schools to be educated together with the students
with intellectual disabilities.
In Romania, as in developed countries such as the United States, UK, or Canada,
the term ‘integration’ refers to the act of physically putting a child with special needs
in a mainstream educational environment, hopefully providing the needed support,
while inclusiveness implies the non-discriminatory acceptance of all individuals in
educational and social settings, providing equal learning opportunities, and welcom-
ing diversity (Slee 1986; Popovici 1998; Porter 2008). In Romania, ‘disability’ is a
term that describes an inability to do something or a lack of a particular ability, while
‘handicap’ is a social disadvantage imposed on a person as a result of a disability
(Gheorghe et al. 1999; Gheorghe 2000). The term ‘special need’ refers to a unique
educational condition that needs to be addressed in an educational setting. The term
‘ableism’ or an equivalent is not commonly used in Romania, except perhaps by
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scholars who studied abroad. Ableism implies discrimination against individuals who
have developmental, emotional, and/or physical disabilities relative to the persons
with full abilities.

General information about Romania

Romania is situated in the south-eastern part of Europe, being bordered by the Black Sea,
Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Ukraine, and the Republic of Moldavia. It has a total surface
of approximately 91,700 square miles, smaller then the state of Oregon (Inter-net World
Stats 2008). The Dacians who inhabited the territory which today comprises Romania
were finally conquered by the Roman Emperor Trajan in AD106. This turn in history
explains the name of the country and the birth of the Romanian language, which is the
only surviving Latin-based language in Eastern Europe. Currently, over 22 million
Romanians live in the country and some other 9 million live outside the country.
According to the 2002 Census, the following minorities coex-ist in the country alongside
ethnic Romanians: Hungarian (6.6%), Roma (2.5%), Ukrainian (0.3%), German (0.3%),
Russian (0.2%), Turkish (0.2%), and other (0.4%) (US Central Intelligence Agency
2008). The official estimates from 1992 conclude that approximately 97% of the total
population of Romania is literate. Compulsory education in Romania starts at age 7 and
requires attendance in nine school grades (i.e. up to age 16). For the school year 2004/05
there were a total of 4,403,880 students enrolled in public Romanian schools (Romanian
National Institute of Statistics 2005). In 2004, it was estimated that there were 37,808
(approximately 0.17% of the total population and 0.85% of the school population)
students enrolled in special education system in Romania, of which 1600 were in special
pre-schools, 23,533 were in special education primary and secondary levels, 782 were in
special high school programmes, 11,682 were in special vocational and apprenticeship
programmes, and 211 were in post-high school and foremen special schools (Current
National Statistical Compendiums 2004; Romanian National Institute of Statistics 2005).

Method
Four types of literature review methods were used in order to identify published data
that investigated the most recent statistics and information available online and in
print relevant to the topic at hand. First, electronic searches on ERIC, PsycINFO,
PsycARTICLES, Professional Development Collection, and Education Full Text
 168 G. Walker

available through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library databases

were conducted. Descriptors for the electronic search included ‘special education’,
‘policy’, ‘inclusive education’, ‘inclusiveness’, ‘disability(ies)’, ‘ableism’,
‘Romania’, ‘statistics’, ‘school’, ‘Rroma/Roma’, ‘European Union’, other relevant
keywords, combinations of these, and the names of researchers known to have
published on these topics. Second, an extensive and advanced online search on
widely available search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, revealed additional
information pertaining to this topic. Keywords included ‘UNICEF’, ‘World Bank’,
‘UNESCO’, ‘EU Commission’, ‘UN’, ‘Ministry of Education, Research, and Youth’,
‘US Department of Education’, ‘Institute of Education Sciences’, ‘National
Organization on Disability’, and ‘National Institute of Statistics’ in combination with
the descriptors mentioned above. The professional help of an Assistant Government
Information Librarian UN Specialist was solicited to find specific information, such
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as the number of Roma students and their socio-economic status enrolled in special
education in Romania. Third, a manual search of the Current National Statistical
Compendiums (2004) was performed on microfilm. Fourth, references cited in
identified and recent articles were used to obtain additional target studies. The text of
each result was investigated. The search was narrowed to studies that met the
following criteria: (1) the greater the number of keywords included in the text, the
more relevant was the text; (2) the information was published or made available
between January 1990 and May 2008; (3) the most recent and relevant information
was included by comparison and selection; and (4) the inves-tigations were published
in English, Romanian, or French (languages with which the author is comfortable).
Inclusion criteria and potential papers for this review were discussed with an
experienced faculty member from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
As mentioned above, the author also added observations from her own experiences in
Romania and the United States to the available published data on this topic.

Personal perspective
As a student of special education and subsequently a teacher in Romania (1996–
2002), I knew that special education laws were comparable with the policy adopted
in more economically advanced countries. However, the services needed to meet the
mandates of those laws were not in place in Romania. During my six years of special
education studies in Romania, I became aware of the scarcity of the literature on
research studies. Framework methodologies and target-specific methods of research
of the sort that special education teachers and researchers from Western Europe and
counties in other economically advanced parts of the world were working within
were not reaching Romanian scholars. Hence, I decided that university studies in the
United States would provide me with better training to become a researcher. After
starting a graduate programme at the University of Georgia, I followed the evolution
of special education policies and the public’s views on people with disabilities in
Romania, and I was disappointed to observe few changes. During my student
teaching experience at several elementary schools in the United States, I noticed that
the differences between the special education systems in the two countries were even
greater than what I had thought just from reading the research literature. The years
that I have spent studying, working, and conducting research in the field of special
education and disability studies have set the stage for my active participation in
research on the policies and practices of the discipline of special education.
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 169

Inclusive education in Romania

Development of inclusive education in Romania
In Romania, the history of special education is part of the history of education,
because they developed simultaneously. However, the growth of education has to be
analysed in the light of social and political development of a country. In the 19th
century, education was seen as a public duty in the ‘Romanian Principates’. At the
time (according to the enlightenment principle that people could be raised through
culture), all children who wanted to become literate were allowed to learn at the
expense of monasteries or churches, regardless of their socio-economic status or type
and level of impairment. Ion Heliade Radulescu was a scholar who reformed educa-
tion in Romania by improving teaching methods, and, as a Minister of Education at
the time, he declared education as a right of every ‘social subject’ without regard to
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his type or level of ‘incapacity’ (Manolache and Pârnu¸a˘t 1993).

During the Communist years (1948–89) the Romanian special educational system
was separated from the mainstream educational system. The special education
institu-tions were situated outside the residential areas and the number of the children
with special needs was not publicly disclosed (Buica˘ 2004). The government’s
attitude was that such persons could not become ‘productive’ members of the
socialist society, and as a result they were marginalised and ignored.
After the Revolution of 15–22 December 1989, the Romanian educational system
and educational policies began to evolve towards the models of more developed
countries. The educational and social policy became centred on the community,
family, and child, rather than on the institution itself, as it had been before. Although
the normalisation principle was being considered for application to individuals with
disabilities (Westling and Fox 2000) beginning with the early 1970s, the concepts of
‘normalisation’ (of life standards of persons with disabilities) and ‘integration’ were
presented to Romanian specialists and introduced as main principles in special
educa-tion in 1991, when a symposium with international participation called
‘Education and Handicap’ took place in Bucharest. The normalisation principle
foresees access to patterns and conditions of everyday life ‘as close as possible to the
norms and patterns of the mainstream society’ (Nirje 1969, 181), and represents a
solid ideological base for integration.
Primarily, the Ministry of Education, Research, and Youth (2006) is responsible for
the development of Romanian general and special education. According to the
legislation, Romanian special education functions according to democratic principles: the
right to differentiated education and educational pluralism (for persons no older than 26
years with disabilities), and equal rights for all Romanian citisens to have access to all
levels and forms of education, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, polit-ical or religious
orientations, or other considerations that could lead to discrimination. Minorities have the
right to study in their mother tongue, to organise special education classes and groups in
minority languages, and the right to receive education that reflects the history and
traditions of each minority through school books and other materials in their mother
tongue, and by having teaching staff trained in those languages. By law, which is
successfully implemented in Romania, special education students are entitled to free state
education, free library information and documenta-tion services (whenever available),
free school books for pre-school, primary and secondary state education, and also for
vocational and high school pupils whose parents earn less than the national minimum
wage. Other services provided by the
 170 G. Walker

state are: social assistance scholarships for students, local and national public
transportation free of cost for students, and maintenance allowances (state alimonies)
for pre-school children, pupils, and students in boarding houses.
The integration of students from special schools into public schools began in the
school year 2001–02. Consequently, the specialists in this field were looking for an
original way to apply the integration principles to the Romanian educational system,
with ‘original’ meaning that the general rules of integration have to be adjusted to the
particular conditions in Romania. Currently, reform of special education in Romania
is beginning with the integration of children with mild and moderate disabilities into
regular schools at different levels, and it is following several models of integration.
‘Physical and social integration’ consists of enrolling or moving one or many students
with special needs into a standard class within a regular school, but then following a
special syllabus. When students with mild and moderate disabilities are placed in a
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regular classroom and taught the same subjects at the same level of difficulty as their
peers, the process is called ‘school and social integration’ (Popovici 1998). In Europe,
there are five known models of organisation of integrated educa-tion: (1) cooperation
between special and regular schools, (2) self-contained class-rooms in a regular school,
(3) resource room, (4) itinerant professor, and (5) common model (Popovici 1998), all
working according to similar mechanisms as in the United States. The Ministry of
Education in Romania chose to put into practice the models based on a self-contained
classroom and an adaptation of the itinerant model. The self-contained classroom is
moving from special to regular school for most of the classes, except for the vocational
and physical education subjects, while studying a special curriculum with special
education teachers. This process is called ‘physical and social integration’. The
adaptation of the itinerant model is called ‘school and social integra-tion’, which refers to
placing one or more students with mild disabilities in a regular class and school,
attending a regular curriculum. A main disadvantage of the latter Romanian model is that
it does not provide the student with any special service, i.e. he has no special education
teacher support, nor special resources appropriate for his disability. For these reasons, a
few of these students, with very good chances of earning a special school diploma,
abandon school without any hope of returning.
In a survey that I conducted for my MSc thesis at the University of Bucharest I
discussed how nine students from the 4th to 8th grades, who had mild intellectual
disabilities and who attended Special School no. 9 in Bucharest were integrated into
Public Schools no. 136 and no. 148 also in Bucharest (Anton 2002). In the special
school, the students from my investigation benefited from an eight-hour schedule
comprised of four hours of classes with a certified special education teacher and four
hours of homework with a non-certified special education teacher, three free meals a
day, and free school supplies provided from the state. Once integrated in the public
schools, the students had to cope with a four-hour condensed daily schedule, no free
meals, no school supplies, and social rejection from their classmates. These students
benefited from their ex-teachers’ help, as after they attended classes in public school,
they sometimes came to the special school and worked on their homework. However,
the special education teachers had to interrupt their work with other students in order
to work with the integrated children. In addition, they received help from the public
school counsellor or psychologist and from their current general education teachers,
who spent time after mandatory classes to explain again some of the delicate matters
of what they taught in class. These teachers were not required by the school system
to spend extra time with the integrated students, but their humanitarian sense dictated
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 171

that they should do it. Educationally, the integrated students had to face the following
problems in the general education school: (1) the school subjects are more diverse
(for example, instead of eight subjects, the child integrated in 4th grade has to study
twelve subjects); (2) the number of teachers increased, each having a distinct person-
ality and demands; (3) the degree of difficulty of the new information increased since
they followed an adjusted public school curriculum, where no Individual Education
Plan (IEP) goals and objectives were considered; (4) the discrepancy between the
knowledge acquired and the knowledge required was all the more obvious if the
grade that they were transferred to was higher (for example, the gap was less obvious
when the student was transferred from 3rd grade to 4th grade and it was larger when
the student was transferred from the 7th grade to the 8th grade); and (5) a new style
of learning as these students were used to receive the information by small amounts
and learn ‘step by step’, with many practice and consolidation exercises. Overall, the
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two students from the 4th grade integrated successfully, but the student from the 6th
grade and three students from the 8th grade had great difficulties in obtaining passing
grades, and the rest of the three students from the 8th grade abandoned school
altogether.
The special education teacher-to-student ratio typically ranges from several to 20
students per teacher, depending on the location of the school, the number of special
education teacher positions the Ministry of Education and Research opens for each
school, and the number of students with special needs referred in the respective year.
Special education is offered at the following levels: kindergarten, primary school,
secondary school, and vocational schools. The school year follows the same organi-
sation as the general education system (i.e. two semesters). In the rural schools there
are relatively few possibilities for children with mild disabilities to be referred to
special education classes due to a lower emphasis on education and to the need for
help on farms.
In Romania, the diagnosis of children with special needs and their placement in
special education settings involves the Territorial Commission of Diagnosis and
Selection and the Commissions of Complex Assessment. The diagnosis process is
mainly comprised of psychological instruments designed to assess the level of
development of typically developing children (Verza, Gheorghe, and Popovici 2004).
Because there are no established eligibility criteria and categories for ASD, EBD,
ADD/ADHD, and LD, there are no specialised services for students that may display
such behavioural characteristics. Children with these types of impairments are very
likely to be included in the general public education, particularly those students with
an average IQ (e.g. high-functioning ASD, Asperger’s syndrome, ADD/ADHD, and
possibly EBD). Other students with LD, low-functioning ASD, and possibly EBD
would be sent to special schools to be educated together with the students with intel-
lectual disabilities. For the students with hearing, visual, and intellectual disabilities,
there are special schools and classes where they can receive specialised services from
trained special educators.
The model of the IEP was adapted for Romanian special education by the special
school inspector and psychologist Petru¸ta Lungu, and it began to be applied in the
school year of 2001–02. The Romanian version of the IEP, called the Personalised
Intervention Programme, has the same basic components as the IEP used in the
United States. It therefore has the following sections: Basic Information about the
Student, Current Status of the Student, Assessment Tools Used, Description of Abili-
ties and Needs, Goals, Objectives, and Recommendations. However, the IEP is
 172 G. Walker

designed according to the special teacher’s decision without parents’ cooperation,

and is approved by the school principal. The goals and objectives specified in the IEP
align with the national special curriculum for the respective grade and with the needs
of the child. On the other hand, because the school curriculum was developed by the
Ministry of Education, Research, and Youth and applied nationwide, and because it
proves to be inflexible and inconvenient at times, changes in students’ IEP that
would record a large discrepancy between the special curriculum and the child’s
perfor-mance are very difficult to design and get approved. After all, a student from a
special school is less likely to repeat school years since the low-rate performance is
the reason he or she is in a special school. Furthermore, the special education teacher
cannot work differentially with each student in the class because there are up to 20
students in one classroom. ‘The education of students with moderate, severe or multi-
ple disabilities is still performed in special separate, small-sized residential commu-
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nity institutions that represent the unique alternative to satisfy the best interests of the
child pursuant to the Convention on the Rights of the Child [UNICEF 2008, articles
3, 23]’ (Popovici 2003, 164).

Inclusive education in Romania after Accession to the European Union

Currently, there is a global trend of disability policies that pushes for social and
educa-tional inclusion of people with special needs, rather than limiting their
experiences to physical integration (Armstrong and Barton 1999). Although the term
inclusion was introduced in the early 1990s (Farell et al. 2004), Romania adhered to
an inclusional policy when educational integration was introduced in 2002 when the
discourse about inclusion was being globally debated. According to Sapon-Shevin
(1992), inclusion supposes full membership and participation of people with
disabilities in general classroom activities. The inclusion policy refers to ‘the extent
to which a school or a community welcomes such pupils as full members of the
group, and values them for the contribution which they make’ (Farell et al. 2004).
The current trend is that equity rather than equality should be targeted in the
inclusive education discourse and practices, for the benefit of not only the individuals
with special needs, but of the entire society. This is recognised as a progressive step
towards accepting diversity. Because education is the outcome of the interconnected-
ness of the circumstance-specific (social, economic, cultural, and historical) factors,
it should be seen within the context of human rights, social justice, and equity of
oppor-tunities (Barton and Armstrong 2007).
Today, although Romanian specialists are currently working for solutions by
adapting regular school services to the needs of the students instead of expecting the
students to adapt to school requirements, ‘children with severe disabilities, children
with autism, and children who are deaf/blind are among the most marginalised in
terms of education often due to insufficient capacity of the educators and support
staff in addressing children with special needs’ (UNICEF 2007, slide 1). In Romania,
there are still a series of obstacles to the development of special education to the
stan-dards of advanced nations with a tradition in educating learners with unique
abilities. Some of these barriers are discussed herein. In terms of services, children
with special needs receive special education from kindergarten level (3 to 6 years
old) to special schools (6 years old and above to eighth grade – the age may vary),
and to professional schools (three years of practical training). Home-schools provide
education for children and home-hostels for adolescents considered ‘educable’ or
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 173

‘partly recuperable/recoverable’. In home-hospitals, the children and adolescents

receive mainly medical care, and there is less emphasis on education due to the
sever-ity of the disability. Thus, the students with mild and moderate disabilities are
educated in special school settings or in the general schools according to an IEP.
Students with severe disabilities enrol in special schools, but special educators do not
have enough time to work closely with each child, so progress is very slow. Parents
of students with severe and profound disabilities choose not to enrol their children in
school, for various reasons: (1) there are no educational programmes for their degree
of impairment; (2) there are no medical services to continuously assist them; (3) the
staff is not trained to deal with teaching functional skills; (4) there is no mean of
transportation, which should be provided by the state at no cost for the parents; and
(5) even if the child is mobile or transportable, there is no enough number of staff,
that would allow educational progress. Learners with severe and profound disabilities
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more often spend their youth years at home or in a state institution. School-aged
children with moderate and severe disabilities from rural areas have a smaller chance
to be sent to school by their parents. Most children and adults with special needs are
provided a special disability allowance from the state, but this monetary support is
not correlated with the cost of living and it cannot fully support their survival (Inclu-
sion Europe 2002). Moreover, the poverty rates are nearly double in the households
with a disabled member (World Bank Social Development Department 2007).
Children with mild physical disabilities and no intellectual impairment attend general
public schools. If they display mild or moderate intellectual disabilities and they are
transportable, then they may be enrolled in a special class or school. If their physical
disability impedes them to attend school and function independently, then it is likely
that they will be kept at home and educated by parents or private tutors be hired by
their parents. They may be educated in a state institution also, but assistive technol-
ogy and other accommodations are not readily available in the state special classes or
schools due to the high costs of these devices and lack of staff training in using such
high-technology devices. There are timid attempts to set up programmes for children
with autism, but they have been funded by private and foreign initiatives, such as the
TEACCH school, the Day Centre for Children with Autism St. Margaret [Centrul de
zi pentru copii autis¸ti Sf. Margareta], and an Autism Romania Association (2008)
classroom. There have also been some efforts to improve the diagnosing process of
ASD children at the Titan Clinic, where MD Dr Urziceanu diagnoses children
according to yet unknown guidelines (L. Toader, President of the Autism Romania
Association, The Association of Parents with Children with Autism, personal
communication 2005).
The universal design in architecture that accommodates wheelchairs and the
adjacent infrastructure is not yet widely implemented. Examples include: the side-
walks are not equipped with ramps; there are no ramps or elevators as an alternative
to stairs that would make public institutions more accessible; the ‘handicap spaces’
from parking lots are scarce and they are occupied by cars not displaying the
universal disability sign, partially because seldom are there instances when the
owners of these cars are penalised and partially because the parking ticket has not a
significant value, correlated to the offence; and the absence of school buses equipped
with special devices for lifting wheelchairs, which pick up children with special
needs to bring them to school or get them home.
A special education teacher most commonly has a college degree, which serves as
the certification necessary in other countries to teach a special education classroom.
 174 G. Walker

The teacher training is ‘psycho-pedagogical’ oriented, i.e. mostly cognitive in nature, and
the practicum classes are loosely supervised by faculty with a heavy load of students on
their roasters. Future teachers have little access to the latest scientific information in this
field due to the small number of recent books acquired by the College of Psychology and
Educational Sciences Library, and to a lack of an elec-tronic database of the College with
recent domestic and foreign scientific publications. In a presentation of the educational
reform under his mandate, Andrei Marga, the former minister of education from 1997 to
2000, mentions that a beginning general education teacher in the pre-university education
system had US$112.29 gross income per month in the year 2000 (Marga 2002). Even
today, a special education teacher’s monthly wage (somewhere around US$250–350,
depending on credentials and experience) is not correlated to the cost of living, given that
the prices have increased since Romania joined the European Union. The absence of
paraprofessionals who would work together with the special education teachers keeps the
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student-to-teacher ratio high (still 1:10–1:15) and elevates the pressure the teachers are
under to develop IEPs, lesson plans, and educate their students. The lack of materials,
non-behavioural teaching methodologies, and lack of access to documentation about
teaching materials are other problems that teachers confront in Romania.

Advocacy for persons with disabilities is much impeded by bureaucratic

paperwork and lack of funding. Launched in 1994, RENINCO Romania Association
(National Information and Cooperation Network for Community Integration of
Children and Youth with Special Educational Needs) is the main national association
that promotes integration of children with special needs in society and public schools
and facilitates communication among its members, namely associations for children
with disabilities from throughout Romania (RENINCO 2005). The RENINCO
Association has 74 organisations and over 400 individuals as its members, among
which the Autism Romania Association, set up in 2001 by a group of parents of
children with autism. Last, but not least, the lack of journals and periodicals that
would invest in publishing manuscripts in the special education field are mostly
limited to the ones powered by the RENINCO and Autism Romania Associations,
the latter being ‘Autism Connex-ions’ (Autism Conexiuni), and a handful of
publishing houses which occasionally publish special education books.

Street children in Romania

In 1966, the Communist regime declared the measures of abortion and contraception
as illegal, taking all possible measures to compel women to obey these laws. The
‘Securitate’, the national intelligence at that time, the ‘Militia’, the former police, and
other state-funded organisms wanted to make sure that Romanian women did not
transgress these ‘fertility laws’ (United Nations 2002a; US Library of Congress
2008). ‘Mandatory pelvic exams in the workplace, the presence of the security police
personnel in maternity hospitals’ (Chavkin 1998, 732), and threatening a person’s
life to obtain confessions were frequent practices during the Ceaus¸escu Communist
period. Many human rights were violated, and common citizens felt powerless and
hopeless. Caught up in a daily fight for their own survival, most Romanians had little
time to feel compassion towards people with special needs. In addition, the media
was under the total control of the government, and people were uninformed about
what was happening behind closed doors or in restricted govern-mental circles.
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 175

Many of the children who were the victims of failed illegal abortion attempts
were born with some type of disability. Such children were often abandoned or put
into an orphanage if they had no disability, or into a state institution if they had even
the smallest physical defect. Regardless of their condition when they arrived in the
institution, the children were all the more debilitated by the inhuman conditions they
were forced to comply with. The documentaries broadcasted in the US in the early
1990s by television shows such as Turning Point, 60 minutes, 20/20, showing the
deplorable conditions in which orphans with disabilities were kept shocked viewers.
Such children were classified as ‘irrecuperable’ by the government, and almost no
attempt was made to improve their situation. Hancock (1997) reported that:

Because of a lack of human love and contact during their first years of life, a frightening
number of the children have underdeveloped motor and communication skills; some are
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unable to speak or walk or feel normal human emotions. Some are filled with an excru-
ciating rage which they don’t understand and cannot control.

Moreover, Hancock (1997) points out that most of those institutionalised children
were Roma (or Romani). ‘Although Romani Romanians constitute only between 10%
and 20% of the national population, they make up as much as 80% of the children in
many of these [institutions].’ These facilities were isolated from the residential
communities, and treated as ‘forbidden zones’, with no visitors allowed to see the
children. Snippets from those shocking documentaries and the latest developments on the
conditions of today’s much improved situation from the Romanian orphanages can be
accessed on YouTube in the ‘Lost Children – Romania’ video (YouTube 2008).
Some of the children that were institutionalised in orphanages or in the state insti-
tutions for children with disabilities, most of them being the result of the legislation
forbidding abortions during the Communism era, were adopted by Romanian or foreign
families, and some of them became ‘street children’. The permanent (spending all their
time in the streets), temporary (spending time in the streets on and off), or day-time
(spending time in the streets only during the day) ‘street children’ represent a social
phenomenon that has gradually extended in Romania since 1989. However, this
phenomenon had existed also before 1989, but it had been much less significant and
hidden to public consciousness. The attempts to estimate the number of the ‘street
children’ lead to a count of about 2000 ‘street children’, with almost 1000 of them living
in Bucharest. In general, the ‘street children’ live in groups, in sewers, slap dash homes,
huts, or in the entrance halls of the apartment buildings. About 71% are boys; 52% are
between seven and 15 years old, 25% are between 16 and 18 (Save the Children
(Romania) 1999). Most of them live from begging or various occasional unskilled jobs,
such as cleaning the windscreens and carrying luggage. Most of them have to with deal
with theft and prostitution during their sojourn in the streets. Among them, there are a
very large number of delinquents of any kind, and this is the reason why the people are
very suspicious and reluctant to have them around, seeing them as potential aggressors.
The majority of these children have tried living in one or more shelters, but they left
because the programmes of social reinsertion elaborated by the non-governmental
organisations are not quite coherent and adequate. There are also street children who
passed through almost all specialised institutions in Bucharest, which they preferred to
leave eventually not wishing to trade the apparent freedom and lack of constraints of an
organised environment. Many of them use some inhalant drugs. The street children
usually come from disorganised, low socio-economic status (SES), violent, alcoholic,
and/or not fostering affective growth type of families. There
 176 G. Walker

are also some ‘street children’ without parents, who leave illegally the orphanages
(A. Ba˘rcu¸tean and N. Dumitras¸cu, ‘The psychological drive profile of the “street
children” in Bucharest’, personal written communication 2003).

Minority over-representation in Romanian special education programmes

The term ‘Roma’ is accepted as the official name of the nation of Romany people, of
Indian descent, in the European Council documents. There is no connection between
the Roma ethnicity and the city of Rome, ancient Rome, Romania, the Romanian
people, or the Romanian language (Wikipedia 2008). In Romania, 2.5% of the total
population has considered itself to be of Roma ethnicity during the 2002 Census
(Romanian National Institute of Statistics 2002). The number or percentage of Roma
students enrolled in special education was not available as of 28 October 2007, and
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not a required figure by the Committee of the Rights of the Child as of 2002.
However, Nica (2005, 15) discusses the disproportionately high number of Roma
chil-dren in special schools that ‘indicates that assessment process should be
carefully monitored to ensure that individual capacity and potential are evaluated
fully and without discrimination’. My personal observation is that the majority
(perhaps more than 70%) of the students enrolled in special education programmes
are of Roma origin.
Worldwide, ‘disability has become a more socially accepted, even normalised,
category of marginalisation for students of color’ (Ferri and Connor 2005, 454–5).
Thus, educational and social separation became segregation, which led to the over-
representation of the Roma minority in the Romanian special education programmes,
as a low ability school track. Another for the high percentage of the Roma population
in the special education programmes in Romania is the economic one. The raised
level of poverty of the majority of the Roma population from Romania is
acknowledged internationally (United Nations 2002b; UNICEF Romania 2006). A
more complete set of social reasons for which a high number of Roma students were
enrolled in special schools are: meals, school supplies, accommodation, therapy, and
clothes (Moisa˘ et al. 2007).
Because of social and cultural conditions, it appears that Roma students come to
school unprepared to learn at the same rate as the majority of students, or they come
to school behind, not gripping the basic requirements for their grade level. The
achievement gap increases over time between the Romanian students and Roma
students because of a combination of family values, material support for child educa-
tion, assessment team members’ perceptions, teachers’ expectations, and students’
access to high quality guidance throughout their academic study.

Conclusions and recommendations

Unfortunately, there are few accounts and no systematic study of Romanians’ percep-tion
of the concept of disability and of persons with special needs either before or after the fall
of the Communist government in 1989. To the best of my knowledge, no study has
analysed original data concerning the differences in development of the inclusive
education field along the three historical periods (the Communist era – before December
1989; the democratic transition period – January 1990–December 2006; and the begin-
ning of European Union membership – January 2007–present). The conclusions of this
research are compared with the status quo of the special education in Western developed
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 177

countries as state-of-the-art standards at the present moment in history in terms of the

investment and commitment of ending ableism and improving the quality of life of
persons with special needs.
Taking into account on the one hand the longitudinal path of the special education
field in the last couple of decades, especially the growth of the field in the last few
years in Romania, and on the other hand acknowledging the gaps, various
understand-ings of concepts, and the system differences between Romania and
developed countries, I consider that inclusive education can be applied in Romania,
but the system is not well prepared, especially when it comes to students with
moderate and severe disabilities.
The educational process is moving slowly towards integration of students with
special needs and of minority students, but there are still many modifications and
adaptations to be made until the current policies could be put into practice. I believe
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that refining eligibility criteria for ID, ASD, EBD, ADHD and broadening of the
spectrum of disability categories would decrease the number in the ranks of Roma
population in the ID classrooms and possibly making them eligible for EBD services.
Even if misdiagnosed as displaying EBD features, due to cultural differ-ences
subjectively interpreted by members of the majoritary population, this would be a
step forward in educating a segment of the Roma population who would have the
intellectual ability to study at a comparable rate with the regular students, instead of
covering the quality and quantity of one-year school material in two years, as they do
while being identified as having ID. In this case, their cultural needs would be dealt
with in a different way with a possibility of improvement over time. Another solution
for preventing Roma parents to preferring that their children be enrolled in special
education programmes would be to provide symbolic meals to a certain segment of
the school children or all school children. This action may also prevent school drop
out.
The profound changes will take place gradually by consistently pairing the old
with the new or facets of the old with aspects of the new, so that eventually the new
replaces the old. If we take a look at other European Union Member States that are
continuously developing a diverse and complex network of special schools, thus
proving the need for such institutions and also their usefulness, and notice that their
educational systems are still implementing residential systems based on integrated
education while maintaining special schools (Popovici 2003), we can be more
optimistic about the policies and practices in Romania. Changes are taking place
slowly but surely and towards the right direction.
In conclusion, in Romania, changes are necessary in several areas, such as the
following:

● Legislative scope – improved or new laws must be drawn up according to the

current Romanian reality, as well as in accordance with international legislations.
● Institutional and provision of services – transforming regular schools into
inclusive schools with special or mainstream classrooms.
● Special education curriculum – a special curriculum for use in regular class-
rooms by students with disabilities must be developed.
● Financial incentive – a raise in salary as an incentive for attracting more future
teachers interested in working with children with disabilities.
● Training curriculum – a move of the field of special education from a ‘psycho-
pedagogical’, i.e. cognitive in nature, towards a behaviourist instructional
 178 G. Walker

methodology.
● Teacher training has to be appropriate to the reality of educating individuals
with special needs in regular settings, which may require training of
professionals in other countries with a good tradition in educating students with
disabilities; locally recognised accreditations for continuous professional
development followed by raises in salary contingent upon professional learning
curves and implementation of good practices.
● Paraprofessional training – the creation of a course to provide them with basic
knowledge in special education behaviour modification principles, and
employ-ment support upon graduation from this course; adding
paraprofessionals in the organisational chart of the schools would represent a
financial viable solution to decrease the teacher–student ratio.
A refreshening of university-level faculties by accepting new members among
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already renowned professors. Preferably, these new members would be experi-

enced teachers encouraged to go through a PhD programme at a local
university and scientists that earned their graduate degrees in other countries.
● Setting up new courses and departmental divisions where students can study
global educational policies.
● Diagnosis criteria – behaviourally defined for easier identification of different
categories of disabilities in Romania; assessment and evaluation tools should
be more precise in pinpointing a wider variety of internationally already
established categories of disabilities for better consistency and standardisation.
● Setting up programmes for children with autism, severe and multiple
disabilities, and other ignored disabilities within public schools.
● More emphasis on human rights and an increase in disability advocacy movement.
● Collaboration across scientific fields and among institutions responsible with
educating learners with special needs, adults with disabilities, street children,
ethnic minorities, orphaned minors, etc.
● Country reporting on detailed statistical data concerning the population
provided with special education services would be beneficial for research
purposes, such as (1) the number (or percentage) of students belonging to
various minorities who are males or females and are served under special
education provisions; (2) the number of students diagnosed with disabilities
broken down on the type of disabilities, on gender, on ethnic background, on
SES, etc. (e.g. how many students with mild ID, who are served in public
education programmes, come from low-income families, or from a Roma
background, or are males); (3) the number of Roma students in the general
schools; and (4) the number of minority students with mild intellectual
disabilities who are receiving some type of financial state support.
● Access to up-to-date research and state-of-the-art standards in educating
learners with special needs.
● In general, building a national and global citizenship where members of society
take responsibility for the development of their community.

Again, this paper is meant to inform academics, educators, politicians, and interested
parents about the status of special education in Romania, namely, the rights of
children with special needs, educational services, initiatives, efforts of Ministry of
Education, Research, and Youth professionals, and parents of learners with diverse
needs. Future studies may: (1) bring further information to the status of policies and
 International Journal of Inclusive Education 179

practices in special education in Romania; (2) increase the body of sound research in
special education field in Romania; (3) focus on one domain in the area of disabilities,
such as funding, social acceptance, awareness of differences among disability catego-ries,
and teacher training; and (4) comparative studies with other Eastern European and Balkan
countries that have undergone similar changes in government in the last 20 years would
be interesting for policy-makers. The last thread of future research would provide the
opportunity to portray the Romanian experience in a European or Balkan context and
have responses to the question of whether the experience Romania is going through is
representative of a larger experience in the region.

Notes on contributor
Gabriela Walker is a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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(UIUC) in the Educational Policy Studies department. Before entering UIUC, she obtained her
BA and MS degrees in psychology and special education and, respectively, inclusive
education at the University of Bucharest, Romania, and continued to study special education
at the University of Georgia, USA, where she earned an Education Specialist degree. Her
research interests include global educational policies, with an emphasis on European and
special educa-tion policies, and applied teaching methodologies for students with Intellectual
Disabilities and Autism Spectrum Disorders. Her work experience includes news-related
editorial work for several newspapers in Romania, teaching children with a range of special
education needs in both Romania and the USA, and teaching undergraduate and graduate level
courses in the USA.

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