At the initiative of the Minister of Education and Science and the presidential candidate – Giorgi Margvelashvili, school teachers will have longer paid holidays. Teachers will get 40 days of vacation and administration and technical staff will get increased salaries. Before this initiative, educators used to get 24-days of paid holidays and they would spend time at school even after the end of a semester. Ambiguous record in Law on Public Education of Georgia, permited directors to make decisions about the duration of teachers' holidays based on their personal will.
“We are happy that we are going to have 2-month-long paid holidays. We used to have only 24-day holidays and we were supposed to stay in town until mid-July without actually having anything to do” – says Lali Giligashvili, a teacher of Georgian Language and Literature, at public school #207.
Maia Kobakhidze stated that since 2009, there was no explicit and clear regulation that would normalize the timeframes of teachers’ paid holidays.
There existed only an obscure regulation and no obligatory terms were defined in labour agreement of a school and a teacher. According to order #959, a teacher could use paid holidays for more than 24 days. It is quite ambiguous and this ambiguity was sometimes used against teachers’ interests forcing them to stay at school after the end of teaching process.
Additionaly, in some schools, directors demanded from teachers to use unpaid time off. The ammendments to the Order #959 will regulate director-teacher relations as it indicates timeframes for teachers’ holidays and directors do not need to wait for verbal orders from the Ministry. As a result, we consider that this problem is solved.” – says Maia Kobakhidze.
This positive news was made public by the Minister and ESFTUG president at a press conference which took place at school #24 and was attended by 80 directors.
“Today we have excellent possibility to express our gratitude to members of our society who are responsible for upbringing next generations, our teachers and school administration workers. We informed them regarding the changes: teachers will have paid holidays for 40 days; They will get two-month salary preliminarily; salaries of administration employees will grow. This way, we tried to support them in their heroic work” – Mr Margvelashvili noted.
Director of public school #24, Gia Murghulia, states that 24 days was determined by labour code and whether a teacher would get more days off depended on a kind will of a director. It is highly appreciated that government found necessary financial resources to prolong holidays for teachers as their work is extremely tiresome and it is also important to have time for planning and preparation for the next year.
Maia Kobakhidze added that protection of teachers' rights will have direct impact on improving education quality. Not being under constant stress and feeling of safety allow teacher to be focused on teaching solely and not on other problems. According to Ms Kobakhidze, we can proudly say that the government is finally taking care of teaching profession.