Bus European School Varese - Ispra Garderie
Are Ispra staff "children of a lesser God"?
Read on and judge for yourself!
NOTE TO THE ATTENTION OF MR D.C. CHIRONDOJAN
DIRECTOR OF THE ISPRA SITE (sent on 1/4/2015)
Subject:
Bus Transport from European School of Varese to Ispra Garderie
Dear Mr Chirondojan,
We
wish to come back to the issue of the bus transport from the European School of
Varese to the Ispra garderie, for which an acceptable long-term solution still
needs to be found.
Already
many months ago, some staff representatives exchanged messages urging all
parties involved to sit at a table together
with PMO in order to identify a solution that, according to our understanding,
could have been easily achieved.
To
our knowledge, this meeting with PMO
was never convened.
We
wish to draw your attention to the information published on MyIntracomm
about education allowances where it is clearly stated that “…your child is
attending one of the European
Schools (primary or secondary level) and using the school transport
service. In this case, it is imperative that you introduce an education
declaration via SYSPER each year to enable the PMO to pay the
organisation administering the school's transport service directly on your
behalf.”
There
is no doubt that PMO is indicated as the entity being in charge of paying
transport fees directly on behalf of Commission staff; no derogation for Ispra
or the JRC is mentioned.
Assuming
that PMO cannot pay for the transportation from the school to the garderie
conflicts with the provisions of Commission
Decision of 16 December 2013.
Declaration
of transportation to the garderie is available in Sysper (see annex), and this
service is commonly available in Brussels (see for instance the rules of bus
transport of the following schools: UCCLE, WOLUWE, IXELLES, LAEKEN).
Following
an inquiry to PMO, we have received further confirmation that the route home-->school-->garderie
is fully covered by PMO itself for parents who are entitled to receive an
education allowance from the 1st primary year onwards, without any need for
these parents to contribute to it.
We understand that at Ispra a proposal to relapse the cost of this bus transport to parents benefiting from this service – via an OIB increase of garderie fees – is under discussion.
As R&D, we strongly regret any deviation from practices applied in the rest of the Institution, and we would regret even more a solution ending up in additional unjustified costs for parents at Ispra – further penalising Ispra staff compared to the rest of Commission staff, and reducing the Ispra site attractiveness.
For the reasons above we urge you, once again, in your capacity of Ispra site Director and President of COPAS, to take immediate contact with PMO and start looking for a real and permanent solution, within the current frame of Commission rules and practices, and without any unjustifiable budgetary impact on concerned staff.
Kind regards,
Hans Nieman
Vice-President
Cc: J.P.
Michel, R.
Crandon, A.
Koletsos, V.
Sucha
Reply from Mr Chirondojan (received on 2 April 2015)
Dear Mr.Nieman,
Dear Mr.Nieman,
Thank you for your message.
I would like to inform you that the issue of the bus transport from Varese to Ispra Garderie was intensively discussed in the last three meetings of COPAS. You might know that in order to ensure the continuity of the service for 2015, COPAS decided and I implemented this decision to allocate 35K EURO from COPAS budget to the Cooperativa managing the service. Moreover we decided to establish a Working Group (WG) that looked further into this issue aiming to find a long-term solution. The WG came back to COPAS with two main recommendations:
I would like to inform you that the issue of the bus transport from Varese to Ispra Garderie was intensively discussed in the last three meetings of COPAS. You might know that in order to ensure the continuity of the service for 2015, COPAS decided and I implemented this decision to allocate 35K EURO from COPAS budget to the Cooperativa managing the service. Moreover we decided to establish a Working Group (WG) that looked further into this issue aiming to find a long-term solution. The WG came back to COPAS with two main recommendations:
- To address to CASS a request for additional budget; this was done and the response was to find a solution locally, no additional budget
- To discuss with the parents benefiting of this service and to convince them to contribute to the financially support of the service
The WG has discussed with PMO, but no solution was identified.
If you state that you "have received further confirmation that the route home > school > garderie is fully covered by PMO itself for parents who are entitled to receive an education allowance from the 1st primary year onwards, without any need for these parents to make any financial contribution", I would kindly ask you to communicate officially to COPAS members the solution identified with PMO and I invite you to the next meeting COPAS to present it. Based on the discussions in the plenary, the COPAS Committee can decide further actions.
- To discuss with the parents benefiting of this service and to convince them to contribute to the financially support of the service
The WG has discussed with PMO, but no solution was identified.
If you state that you "have received further confirmation that the route home > school > garderie is fully covered by PMO itself for parents who are entitled to receive an education allowance from the 1st primary year onwards, without any need for these parents to make any financial contribution", I would kindly ask you to communicate officially to COPAS members the solution identified with PMO and I invite you to the next meeting COPAS to present it. Based on the discussions in the plenary, the COPAS Committee can decide further actions.
Best regards,
Dan Chirondojan
Our reply to Mr Chirondojan (sent on 2 April 2015)
Dear Mr Chirondojan,
Best Regards,
Hans Nieman
Vice-President
Dan Chirondojan
Our reply to Mr Chirondojan (sent on 2 April 2015)
Dear Mr Chirondojan,
Thank you for your message, which confirms the correctness of our information, and namely that no long-term solution has been identified so far and that a recommendation to ask parents to pay for the service is imminent.
The central issue that we wished to point out in our previous message is that staff working in Brussels have a right to a free transport service from school to after school care, a right that is not defended for JRC staff working at Ispra: we strongly regret that the JRC management is ready to support the concept that Ispra staff rights are different and inferior to those of staff working in other sites.
We also regret that you don't seem to have taken the time to go through all the information provided in our message which would have convinced you that PMO normally pays for this service in Brussels. Since finding a contact in PMO seems to be a "mission impossible" for most of involved stakeholders, we are happy to inform you that it is quite easy to find the person in PMO.1 responsible for "Contrôle des allocations scolaires" on the Commission Directory. In order to obtain definitive confirmation, a colleague of ours asked this contact person: "I am about to move to Brussels and I would be grateful if you could answer the following question (information on the schools websites is not very clear to me): My son will take the bus from home to the school in the morning but I need that in the afternoon he goes to the garderie. Is it possible to have this kind of service, i.e. home-school-garderie? If yes, is the whole cost covered by the Commission through your service or the parents need to contribute to it?" PMO.1 answered: "Your son will be able to take the formula home-school-garderie for the use of the European School bus. They will charge us a complete fare for this use and you won't need to supply."
It must be remembered that COPAS members, both administration nominated and staff representatives, were astonished that the JRC management had passed this issue onto COPAS last year, without JRC management having made any serious attempt to resolve the issue at institutional level. You insist on putting COPAS at the core of the discussion despite all COPAS members agreeing since the beginning that COPAS was not the appropriate body entitled to find a durable solution, and that access to COPAS credits was only an emergency one-off.
COPAS, being a local body, and its ad hoc WG, was clearly only able to evaluate possible options which could be implemented locally in extremis to avoid closure of the service in the absence of a more appropriate institutional solution - we would expect you to be aware that for this reason a formal discussion between the COPAS WG and PMO never took place.
Further to your question to "communicate officially to COPAS members the solution identified with PMO" and your invitation to present it at the next meeting COPAS, we wish to inform you that Trade Unions have no institutional role to send official communications to COPAS members and we invite you to do it in your capacity as COPAS President. Furthermore, unfortunately, we have no authority to deal with PMO directly and on behalf of JRC management.
We hope that the evidence we have passed on to you will now be used by all relevant stakeholders to the benefit of our colleagues using the ES Varese – Ispra Garderie bus service and we reiterate, even more firmly, our request that the JRC organise a meeting with PMO urgently to ensure full respect of the rights of Ispra-based staff.
Best Regards,
Hans Nieman
Vice-President
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