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Municipalities are seeking access to European Union subsidies to join at least another 18 thousand children to public kindergartens in Greece, in which there is a chronic shortage of vacant places. Due to the current cut budgets, almost half of the children under school age in the country are likely to remain outside the lists of day kindergartens and nurseries this year.

Applications for day kindergartens and nurseries from 83 thousand families are waiting for approval. Only 40 thousand of them may be approved. This means that 53 thousand children may remain outside kindergartens and nurseries. After his meeting with the Central Union of Municipalities of Greece, Minister Yiannis Vroutsis suggested to economize 50% of the cost of centres for creative development of children and to cut the cost per child in nurseries by 20% and per child in preschool by 15%. These cuts could save around 45 million euro and kindergartens could take another 13 thousand children to care for. Mayors in Greece oppose the cuts of the cost per child because they believe that the quality of services will drop and reach a very low level. They require from the government to give them the missing funds by activating the frozen European subsidies. Vroutsis’ administration insists that the government cannot fill the hole with the structural funds for operational failures.

The deepening of the crisis in Greece has driven an increasing number of women to look for a full-time job, which in the last two years resulted in a higher number of children to be enrolled in kindergartens. The criteria for enrolling children in kindergartens are mainly related to the financial status of the family. Priority is given to needy families, unemployed, disabled, orphans and children with one parent. Municipal authorities require a copy of the tax return from the family of the child to prove that they live at or below the threshold of poverty, which puts the child up in the list of candidates.

The crisis has deprived local authorities of the ability to reallocate funds for social programmes for municipalities to other projects. The monthly funding of municipalities in 2011 was 168 million euro. In June 2012, it was reduced to 135 million euro. The introduction of the new austerity measures will reduce the monthly funding of Greek municipalities to 96 million euro and the final amount is possible to fall to 72 million euro. The heads of local government organizations are warning that with the advent of the new season, municipal employees would remain without salaries and electricity and other bills would most likely not be covered.

It is often heard in Greece that kindergartens are full of children of foreigners. According to the Ministry of Education, the percentage of immigrants’ children in the Greek kindergartens reached 25% in 2010. Far-right nationalist organizations insist that children of immigrants are more easily accepted in Greek kindergartens because their parents work informally, do not pay taxes and look poor on paper but have a very good standard of living actually. One of the election promises of Golden Dawn was that it would take care to take the children of foreigners out of kindergartens in order to provide more places for the children of pure Greeks. GRReporter made repeated attempts to contact representatives of the Central Union of Municipalities of Greece to comment on the issues raised but unfortunately, our efforts were fruitless.