In Its Efforts to Integrate Roma, Slovakia Recalls U.S. Struggles

Tomasz Lazar for The New York Times

A court ruling is slowly helping lead to joint classes for white and Roma students in Slovakia.

SARISSKE MICHALANY, Slovakia â€" Gazing out his window during morning recess on his first day at work, the principal of an elementary school here, Jaroslav Valastiak, was caught up short: all the children playing in the asphalt-covered yard were white, a strikingly monochromatic scene at a school where a majority of pupils are dark-skinned Roma.

The Roma children, he then discovered, had all been shepherded into a separate, Roma-only playground.

Lunchtime brought another shock. The school canteen served only white children, with Roma pupils left outside with bagged rations, instead of hot food. Classes were also divided, officially on the basis of academic aptitude, but in a manner that ended up grouping students along rigid ethnic lines.

“The segregation here was as obvious as fireworks,” Mr. Valastiak said.

The 59-year-old principal has spent the past year trying to break down barriers, both physical and mental, in a painful struggle for integration that some here say echoes that of the United States more than a half-century ago.

“The situation in Slovakia now is exactly the same as it was in the United States,” said Peter Pollak, a Roma member of Parliament and the government’s plenipotentiary for Roma communities, who recently visited the United States to learn about its battles over segregated schooling and other entrenched barriers to equality.

In a continent faced with an economic crisis, soaring unemployment and bursts of nationalist populism, the elementary school here in eastern Slovakia is a microcosm of one of Europe’s biggest challenges: how to keep old demons of ethnic scapegoating at bay and somehow bring its most disadvantaged and fastest growing minority into the mainstream.

Many Europeans associate Roma with crime, particularly well-organized gangs of young Roma pickpockets who prey on local residents and tourists alike in the Continent’s wealthier cities.

Descendants of medieval migrants who arrived in Europe from India more than a millennium ago, Roma, also known as Gypsies, now account for around 10 percent of Slovakia’s population and a substantial minority in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Macedonia. There are also Roma communities scattered across Western Europe.

In all these places, they outpace all other groups in unemployment, illiteracy and other indicators of deprivation and as targets for abuse and sometimes violent attack.

Only 20 percent of Roma men of working age in Slovakia have jobs â€" compared with 65 percent in the general population â€" and they die 15 years earlier than the national average, according to a World Bank report last year. Only 28 percent of Roma children even start the equivalent of high school, compared with the 94 percent of native Slovaks who graduate.

In terms of health, income and education, the report said, the “dire situation” of Slovakia’s Roma “is more comparable with that of countries in sub-Saharan Africa than the European Union.”

The struggle for desegregation in Sarisske Michalany and other towns and villages across wide stretches of Europe has galvanized a small but energetic band of civil rights activists and stirred angry opposition from defenders of the status quo.

“There is a lot of resistance to what we are trying to do,” said Vlado Rafael, the director of EduRoma, a group that is now working with Mr. Valastiak, the school principal.

The most powerful lever working for desegregation in Slovakia has been the court system, which has been reinforced by antidiscrimination statutes adopted in the past decade to bring the code into conformity with European Union standards.

Inspired by the landmark 1953 United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregated schooling unconstitutional, Vanda Durbakova, a Slovak civil rights lawyer, filed a suit in 2010 against the Sarisske Michalany elementary school. Recently, she won a legal victory.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 10, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Its Efforts to Integrate Roma, Slovakia Recalls U.S. Struggles.