Russian School Defense Staff


Russian School Defense Staff or Headquarters for the Protection of Russian Schools — movement in Latvia for protection of public secondary education in Russian. Leaders: Vladimir Buzayev, Gennady Kotov, Yury Petropavlovsky, Miroslav Mitrofanov, Mihail Tyasin, Viktor Dergunov, Vladislav Rafalsky, for some time also Alexander Kazakov, one of the most prominent spokesmen — Yakov Pliner.

Aims of the movement

Cancelling the Education law provisions, which originally ordered the language of instruction in public secondary schools to be only Latvian since 2004. It also supports providing effective learning of Latvian language in the Latvian language and literature lessons and specific preparation of teachers for Russian schools.

History

The Staff was founded in April 2003 as a coalition of various organizations, most prominent being ForHRUL, and later expanded, involving nonpartisan people. In 2003–2004, the Staff has organized political demonstrations to protest to expanding use of Latvian language in Russian schools.
As a result, the Education law was amended in February 2004, allowing to teach up to 40% in the forms 10-12 in minority languages. The proportion of teaching 60% of subjects in Latvian and 40% in Russian, according to BISS research, was supported by 20% of the teachers, 15% of pupils and 13% of parents in minority schools and most stated that they would rather support bilingual instruction in all subjects; only 15% of teachers thought that no reform was needed, while this opinion was expressed by 36% of parents and 44% of pupils. The parliamentary opposition started two cases before the Constitutional Court of Latvia with most of its demands being refused.