The spokesperson for the Popular Parliamentary Group, Australia Navarro, questioned this Thursday that the beginning of the next school year "is not progressing adequately" and criticized the "chaos" in which the Canarian president, Ángel Víctor Torres, has turned it into.
Navarro, who met together with the deputy and head of Education, Lorena Hernández, with representatives of the main union organizations with a presence at the Sectoral Education Table to analyze the "uncertainty" generated in the autonomous community around the beginning of the 2020/21 academic year, regretted that "43 days before the return to the classrooms there is still no clear and agreed roadmap with the educational community regarding the opening of schools in September".
"After the doubts, complaints and demands that the unions have conveyed to us, the only certainty we have is that this Government mismanaged education during the pandemic and is managing it worse now, with which the result is that the return to classrooms in the Canary Islands is not progressing adequately", she stated.
For Navarro, education cannot wait "until after the summer", and the "improvisation" of this Government keeps the entire educational community "paralyzed" because "there are still many questions in the air and few answers such as the student-teacher ratio per classroom, whether new spaces will have to be enabled, whether new teaching positions will be called or whether classes will be fully face-to-face at all educational levels".
"Almost 300,000 students in kindergarten, primary, secondary and high school are still waiting for a decision from the Government; 10,000 substitute teachers are still waiting to know their destination next year; a thousand management teams are waiting for the order to condition their centers and the more than 100 school transport companies do not know when they will restart the almost 2,000 routes that serve 45,000 students," she stressed.
In that line, she commented that "it is unforgivable that the person responsible for giving certainty to the sector is the first to generate nervousness and insecurity, and it is even sadder that there are rules to go to shops or leisure venues and there is still no protocol for returning to classrooms, thus casting doubt on the priorities of this Government and its management capacity".
In this sense, the Popular Party proposes the implementation of a protocol that, among other measures, contains a digitization plan --with means and training to eliminate the digital divide--, and a health plan that clarifies the procedure in the event of possible infections, and takes into account some measures such as the creation of nursing positions in schools and the performance of tests on the entire educational community.
The spokesperson for the Popular Group asked both President Torres and the Minister of Education, Manuela Armas, to "not repeat the mistakes of the past", while demanding that they "put on the table now the protocol for the start of the school year with the necessary measures to certify the return to classrooms with all the security guarantees that dispel the uncertainty and nervousness of teachers, non-teaching staff, families and students".
