Publishing houses face fines for late school textbook deliveries - Ministry of Education
Publishing houses that delivered textbooks to schools late will pay millions in fines, Deputy Minister of Education and Science Nadiya Kuzmichova has said.
“The state assumes obligations to deliver paper textbooks. As of September 1, we had delivered 84%. Accordingly, there are these 16% that did not reach schools on time. The reason for the lateness, in particular, is the testing of the new mechanism. That is, some publishing houses managed, and some did not manage to timely pack, send and, in fact, track the receipt of these textbooks,” Kuzmichova said in a comment to the Interfax-Ukraine agency on Thursday, answering the question of why the new mechanism for delivering textbooks (from publishing houses to educational institutions) showed worse results this year than the old mechanism (through regional book databases).
According to the Deputy Minister, one of the reasons why this happened is that some publishing houses overestimated their capabilities
“We see that we have four publishing houses that entered into a partnership, joined their efforts, but in fact, it worked worse than if each delivered separately… But in no case can we say that if one did not manage, or, for example, four out of 15, this means that the mechanism is not working well,” she added.
She singled out the “Ranok” publishing house, which was supposed to deliver 770 ,000 textbooks directly using the new mechanism, and coped with this task almost on time.
At the same time, she said that the Geneza publishing house, being large enough, undertook to deliver its textbooks, as well as textbooks from three slightly smaller publishing houses, but it did not have the capacity for this.
“And this means that the reason for the non-delivery by other publishing houses is not in the mechanism, not in the fact that it does not allow this to be done, but in the absence of safeguards that we are analyzing and will lay down for the next time, including higher penalties. They are there now, and all these publishing houses will pay millions in penalties,” she said.
In particular, according to her, according to the terms of the contracts, more than UAH 3 million in fines for non-delivery of textbooks have already accrued in September, and if the textbooks are not delivered by the end of September, then from October 1 the penalties will double.
“That is, the mechanism of sanctions, it is also in this contract. But if we see such a situation, I have a logical conclusion that this mechanism is insufficient. That is, it does not have other safeguards. And therefore we will think about what to add more,” she said.
