Discounted Transportation Demands of Private School Teachers in Ankara and Izmir were Denied!

On January 17, 2020, private school teachers started to send their petitions to the big city municipalities in Ankara and Izmir, upon the call of the Private School Teacher Solidarity Network. This request, Special Public Buses Regulation, art. Presented without any discrimination between teachers in the provision of 15; “Elementary, high school and equivalent school students, higher education students and teachers move with a discounted rate with their passes. The students studying in primary schools benefit from this right with their school identity cards even if they do not have a pass. ” The rejection responses started to come very quickly to the petitions submitted by the teachers.

Private school teachers were able to benefit from the transportation discount in Ankara until the end of 2015. However, in 2015, this discount right was abolished without explaining its reason and reason. Ankara Cards, which are currently used for public transportation within Ankara Metropolitan Municipality, are allocated to teachers working in public at a discount. The same situation exists in İzmir.

It was shown that teachers working in private education institutions are not counted as “education and training services class staff” as a reason for the rejection responses to the petitions given to change the discounted transportation card application and extend the teacher discount to include private school teachers. The justifications of metropolitan municipalities are based on the Civil Servants Law No. 657. On the other hand, there are regulations that give discounted access to teachers working in private education institutions, especially Antalya and Istanbul Metropolitan Municipalities.

Following the rejection responses, Ankara and İzmir Private School Teacher Solidarity decided to come together as soon as possible to determine both the ways of objection to these responses and the action plan they will carry out until these requests are met. As the Private School Teacher Solidarity Network, they demanded a meeting from the metropolitan municipalities first and stated that they would try to bring this agenda to the city council agenda and insist on their demands until it occurs. The common statement of Ankara and İzmir Private School Teacher Solidarity Networks is as follows:

We are education workers and teachers working in private educational institutions. Although we do the same profession, we get less salary than our colleagues working in public institutions and we do not have job security. In addition to struggling to improve our personal rights, we come together to eliminate inequalities we experience. One of these is the inequality we experience while using public transportation. We teach, but we cannot benefit from the transportation service discount that our colleagues working in the public have. We applied to the metropolitan municipalities with a petition on January 17, 2020 to eliminate this inequality. While waiting for our request to be evaluated and given some time, our request for transportation discount in both provinces was rejected very quickly by providing legal reasons. We were informed that we are not "education and training services class staff". You teach us, teach them in public or private educational institutions without any difference. We insist on our discounted transportation card request and we will continue to make our voices heard until this right is granted to us.