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Issue 749
21 - 27 FEB 2014
More education cuts PARENTS AND educators around the community are banding together to fight against proposed government cuts in Education. by Keith Nicol The proposal is to close 53 classrooms, with a loss of 70 jobs, at the very least. Meanwhile, affected families are preparing legal action and combining resources to fight the cuts. The 53 classrooms do not relate to schools in their entirety but specifically to cut back on the first year of schooling for children aged three. Add to that, there are also plans for other primary school classes, while locally, in Torrevieja parents, teachers and staff were told that the City of Oviedo school will not reopen after the summer. This week, representatives from the Alicante teachers union and representatives of the families affected by the abolition of classrooms in their schools, held a meeting with the intention of agreeing new measures to try to counter this latest decision from the Department of Education. They noted that there is a period of one month to appeal against the proposal, and two months to raise an appeal before the TSJV, Parents, the Superior Court of the Valencian Comteachers, munity. They are also preparing complaints politicians to be presented to the Ombudsman and and unions building a strong mobilization campaign of protest protests in parliament and on the streets. again the Valencia already scores very low when closing a school in it comes to pupil and parent satisfaction Torrevieja levels and with a repeat rate of more than
30%, many parents have already noted the poor performance of the educational system within the community. However, these figures cannot all be laid at the feet of teaching staff, as recent cutbacks have meant that substitute teachers have not been available in many cases for teachers that are missing due to sickness, maternity leave or other reasons. Last Wednesday afternoon, the educational community from Torrevieja’s public school ‘City of Oviedo’, met to assess the final decision of the school to close in July. Members of the management team reported that the education authority had not provided details for what was happening with the school for the next academic year, but that they would give their decision later. Parents and management said this was clearly an unsatisfactory decision and thus the assembly of parents proposed different measures to continue disagreeing with the closure of the centre. Some of their plans of action include meeting with Mayor Eduardo Dolon to report on the new situation; to meet with AMPAS, the parents and teachers association to ask for their support against the closure of the school, and if continuity of the school is not guaranteed for 2014/15 academic year, to plan a series of demonstrations under the slogan, ‘The City of Oviedo is not closed’.