The government hour in the Duma was dedicated to children's recreation and health improvement
On Tuesday, deputies of the State Duma spent about three hours asking the ministers of education and health the most pressing, in the opinion of parliamentarians, issues of children's summer holidays. The ministers, Sergei Kravtsov and Mikhail Murashko, talked about successes - Mr. Kravtsov, for example, clarified that last summer almost every third Russian schoolchild took part in organized recreation. The deputies were still worried and talked about problems with the accessibility of the camps, compliance with sanitary standards and educational work in them. Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin proposed solving all these problems with the help of a framework law on organizing children's recreation - and this idea was immediately supported by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko.
Tuesday's government hour was the first to passed in announced by State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin format: Not just one relevant minister spoke to the deputies, but several representatives of the White House involved in solving a common task. The task in this case was to organize children's recreation: Chairman of the Duma Control Committee Oleg Morozov (EP) noted that twelve authorities are dealing with this topic on the basis of ten basic laws and five hundred other regulations. Despite this, “the coverage of children with summer recreation and recreation significantly lags behind both the Soviet experience and the demands of society.”
The head of the Ministry of Education, Sergei Kravtsov, was responsible for the statistics (monitoring children's recreation is the task of his department). The total amount of funding for children's recreation this year reached a record 83 billion rubles, which is 15 billion more than in 2023. The coverage of children with organized recreation increased over the year by 465 thousand and amounted to more than 5.7 million (29% of the total number of schoolchildren).
In total, more than 39 thousand children's camps operated - the minister, however, clarified that most of them (79%) were school-based and included only daytime stays.
School formats, according to Mr. Kravtsov, “are especially in demand among parents of primary school children and solve issues of employment, safety and development of children in the summer months.” In addition, they are cheaper: the average cost of a ticket to a school camp is 7 thousand rubles, and to a country stationary camp - from 35 thousand to 40 thousand. As for country camps, many of them are privately owned, and in this case the Ministry of Education does not controls the content of educational and educational programs. “Here we need to build a unified system separately,” noted Mr. Kravtsov.
This remark evoked a sympathetic response from parliamentarians: Oleg Morozov proposed increasing the number of military-patriotic shifts and better monitoring the values that are instilled in children in the summer: “Thematic shifts about Minecraft and Harry Potter are not what we need.” First Deputy Chairman of the Education Committee Yana Lantratova (SRHR) proposed creating Avangard military-patriotic education centers (similar to the one near Moscow) in all regions of the country.
The head of the Ministry of Health, Mikhail Murashko, said that children vacationing in camps this summer were 98% provided with medical staff - this was helped by the participation of second-year residents, who can now be involved in such work. As a result, there were 20% fewer sick children than a year ago. Deputy Head of Rospotrebnadzor Irina Bragina, however, noted that against this background there were more camps with identified sanitary violations: they were found in 42% of inspected organizations.
Vyacheslav Volodin suggested that this is directly related to low salaries: “Cooks in canteens receive the minimum wage, qualified specialists do not go to work for that kind of money.” The deputies became animated again and began to discuss the low level of counselors’ salaries. Vice Speaker of the State Duma Irina Yarovaya (EP) linked the problems of the camps with the too long response of regulatory authorities to complaints from parents - 30 days: she proposed reducing this period tenfold for appeals on problems of children's recreation.
Member of the Education Committee Anna Skroznikova ("New People") noted that those who do go on vacation - not everyone who wants to can do this - are often dissatisfied: “Parents constantly write to us: food poisoning, boring program. We are riding on the old heritage, on the old infrastructure and methods.”
First deputy chairman of the faction Communist Party of the Russian Federation Nikolai Kolomeytsev happily turned to old methods. “In 1982,” he remembered for some reason, “the trade union together with the enterprises were responsible for children’s summer holidays. And the party adopted a comprehensive program for summer recreation for children.” In modern Russia, instead of trade unions, banks could help finance children’s recreation: the communist suggested to them that they simply “allocate 5% of profits to restore the infrastructure of children’s camps.” The idea did not find support among those gathered.
But the speaker of the State Duma proposed to develop and adopt a “framework law on the organization of summer children's recreation” to solve “such multidirectional problems.” He was immediately supported by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko: this, in his opinion, will make it possible to fix “all terms, concepts and systemic approaches” and at the same time “update the basics of state regulation and control of children’s recreation, which have not been updated since 2017.” Mr. Chernyshenko mentioned that the government is working on creating digital platforms for monitoring health camps and plans to build an “open public rating” of them based on the data received.
