The Waldorf School in Rosia is part of the public school system. The regular village school in Rosia and the Waldorf School both share the same location, on top of a beautiful hill. Yet the Waldorf School is “for Roma children only.” And given the buildings stand side by side, you can immediately tell which the Roma kids are by looking to see which building they enter every morning.

Most of the Roma community lives at the bottom of the hill, so when I first saw the Roma kids climbing the quite steep slope, carrying their worn, faded rucksacks, they reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus.

From the first day the plans for the school were presented to the community, it was clear to everyone in Rosia that the Waldorf School was going to be the school for the poor and uneducated Roma kids.

The idea of having such a place solely for Roma kids was bad enough, but building the school next to the village school takes the biscuit.

Mixed educational institutions are regarded as the best solution for integration in the United States. In some cases, they worked as planned. In other cases, after a time, the white kids “migrated” to better neighbourhoods with better schools, where the majority of the pupils were white, while the African-American kids remained in the schools in the deprived areas, where the minorities eventually formed their own majority. Because this appeared to be a personal decision, and because the kids never shared the same backyard, this kind of segregation is not as in-your-face as the case of the two schools in Rosia.

For generations now non-Roma kids have grown up knowing that Roma kids attend the worst schools, which are perceived as being for “stupid people” and paupers. Therefore, you will have a hard time convincing them as grown-ups that Roma are anything but stupid paupers.

The school’s founders and the neighbouring racists generally accept that the Waldorf School has just two things to offer: food and hugs, and that Roma kids lack both at home. But what they lack even more is an answer to the question: “What will I do after I leave school?” Unfortunately, the Waldorf School and other similar projects do not have an answer to this question.

The first thing we should integrate is support. Exposing Roma kids to a warm world where they can get a square meal and the care they quite often lack at home, only then to cast them back into the same hopeless situation at the end of the eighth grade, is sheer cruelty.

Allocating resources to save just one kid doesn’t make sense. But that is precisely what the Waldorf School in Rosia appears to have accomplished. The kid in question is Cristina, a former pupil at the school, who was hired as an educator at the kindergarten. Today Roma and non-Roma alike envy her for her job at the kindergarten. No one else has been so lucky.

So what about the rest?

An integrated system needs to be put in place, ready to take Roma school-leavers. If we don’t create a system that successfully supports Roma school-leavers in finding a job, given the environmental conditions in which they live, then we will not create enough success stories, enough examples to be followed, enough dreams for the future. This will kill all hope, leaving these kids exposed, the same as their uneducated parents before them. As a result, most of the girls will continue to end up pregnant before they turn eighteen and the boys will go on searching every day for a different job— and end up on the bottle to the end of their lives.

Creating such a system will not be easy, since we are still a nation of “dishwashers”. Not that is anything wrong with washing dishes, but how to integrate millions of Roma if we can’t find room for them even at the bottom of the employment chain? We too need to evolve, and apparently this will be a far greater challenge than integrating Roma.

Strategically, strengthening agriculture and training Roma in this sector might provide an answer to the question “what will I do after I leave school?” But you don’t integrate Roma by placing them in segregated schools. You let all kids, Roma and non-Roma alike, live together so that they discover and learn to respect each other.

And you create after-school programs for all kids, not just Roma. The kids who attend them will no longer be seen as “stupid” but as hardworking, determined, and in control of their own future.

In the meantime, schools like the Waldorf School in Rosia perpetuate discrimination and segregation. The thought that racists in this country take this school as an example of the best practice scares me.