Jovina Gymnasium Parents Demand Minister's Resignation

Parents of students at Novi Sad’s “Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj” gymnasium, known as Jovina Gymnasium, demanded on August 4 that Education Minister Dejan Vuk Stankovic resign, as they put it, immediately and without delay. The trigger was his appearance on Informer TV the day before, where he proposed returning Jovina Gymnasium to the Serbian Orthodox Church, the institution that founded it.

Alongside the resignation demand, parents called in their statement for a public apology, to be issued that same day. Their objection is not religious but legal. Handing the school to the church, they argue, would amount to its de facto closure.

What the minister proposed

In that broadcast, Stankovic said gymnasium education in Novi Sad suffers under the weight of daily politics and, in his words, “Vojvodina separatism.” For Jovina Gymnasium itself, he offered a solution no education minister before him had voiced out loud.

“Maybe the solution is to return it to the church, which would establish an order with both an educational and a spiritual dimension, and bring the spiritual substance back into gymnasium education in Novi Sad,” Stankovic told Informer TV.

We reported on the proposal while it was still just the minister’s idea, spoken in a television studio. A little over twenty four hours later it had an addressee: parents demanding that the man who raised it leave his post.

Why parents see closure in the proposal

The parents’ argument rests on the Law on the Fundamentals of the Education and Upbringing System. Under current regulations, churches and religious communities are allowed to found educational institutions, but those institutions are not state run.

“Instead of answering the question of what happened to the tender for a new principal, which he promised in July and for which the legal deadline has already passed, Dejan Vuk Stankovic allowed himself, as a member of the Government of Serbia, to propose returning Jovina Gymnasium to the Serbian Orthodox Church. This would mean the school’s de facto closure, since under the Law on the Fundamentals of the Education and Upbringing System it would become a private gymnasium,” the parents said.

That carries a concrete consequence: the curriculum would then depend not on the ministry but solely on the church’s decisions. The school would leave the network of state institutions, taking enrollment, funding and course content with it.

The second part of their objection concerns the community the school serves.

“Novi Sad and Vojvodina are multiethnic communities, so any confession taking over this famous school would mean the loss of Jovina Gymnasium, a training ground for talented students and well known public figures,” the statement reads.

The unanswered question about the principal’s tender

One part of the statement that has stayed out of the public debate concerns the principal. Parents point out that the minister still owes them an answer to a question raised long before this proposal: what happened to the tender for a new principal of Jovina Gymnasium, promised in July, for which the legal deadline has already passed.

The school is still run by principal Radivoje Stojkovic, whose removal part of the parents have been seeking for months, citing poor management and teacher suspensions. Stojkovic rejects the accusations and says he acts in accordance with regulations. The tender question has stopped being a procedural detail and become a test of whether the ministry runs Jovina Gymnasium by law or by day to day political calculation.

A school without a building, but with medals

Jovina Gymnasium spent last school year without a roof of its own. The building was closed as unsafe, and students were scattered across three Novi Sad schools. Some of the University of Novi Sad professors who taught them were not there for them.

Parents cite that as their answer to the minister: even under those conditions, students brought home more medals from international competitions that year.

“History does not remember a Serbian education minister who linked such exceptional students, and their professors, with any kind of separatism, so the students’ parents expect a public apology and the resignation of Minister Dejan Vuk Stankovic within the day,” they said.

The statement closes with a message that there will be no giving up.

“Parents, like the students and professors of the gymnasium, will not give up on Jovina Gymnasium. They will defend it even more forcefully and wholeheartedly, because in fighting for it we are protecting both education and Serbia,” the statement reads.

Less than a month remains before the start of the new school year, and neither open question has been resolved: not where the students will sit in September, nor who will run the school. The proposal to return the gymnasium to the church has now added a third.