The Ministry of Education, Vocational Training, Physical Activity and Sports, led by Poli Suárez, has put out to tender the drafting of the project for the reform and expansion of the Special Education Center (CEE) Nuestra Señora de los Volcanes, located in the municipality of Teguise. This is an action highly demanded by the island's educational community. The contract for the drafting of the project has a budget close to 220,000 euros and will allow for the design of the future expansion of the center.
With this initiative, the aim is to design a comprehensive expansion of the center that allows responding to the growth of the student body and, at the same time, improve the conditions of educational and therapeutic care that students with disabilities or special educational needs receive. In this way, the action will allow the center to reach an area more than double the current one and have new specialized classrooms and adapted spaces to the needs of the students, including a therapeutic pool.
Our Lady of the Volcanoes is the only special education center in Lanzarote and serves students from all over the island. In this context, during recent years the increase in demand for places and specialized services has forced the installation of various modular classrooms to be able to respond to existing educational needs.
“The objective of this action is to provide a definitive response to a need that the educational community has been conveying for years,” explained the general director of Infrastructures and Equipment, Iván G. Carro. “We want the center to have facilities in line with the current reality of the students and with spaces that allow them to develop their educational and therapeutic activity in the best conditions.”
Carro added that the expansion will allow for a qualitative leap in specialized educational care on the island. “We are working so that the new center has much more adequate classrooms and resources, specifically designed for the needs of the students and the educational team itself, so that it can become a benchmark in special education.”
For this, the definition of the needs of the future building has been carried out in coordination with the educational center itself. The technicians responsible for the project have worked together with the management of the CEE Nuestra Señora de los Volcanes to identify the necessary spaces and adapt the design to the specific characteristics of the students it serves. Furthermore, the development of this expansion has required coordination with the Teguise City Council and the Cabildo de Lanzarote, due to the need to reorganize the adjacent land and the accesses to the center to be able to execute the action.
This inter-administrative collaboration has facilitated the necessary urban planning solution for the project to be able to develop and now advance in the drafting of the expansion of the center.
Educational infrastructures
The expansion of the CEE Nuestra Señora de los Volcanes is framed within the Strategic Plan for Educational Infrastructures 2024-2035. This plan contemplates an investment of 235 million euros for fifty actions throughout the archipelago, with the objective of creating new centers, expanding existing facilities and adapting educational spaces to the new needs of the system.
Within this planning, the improvement of resources allocated to students with special educational needs constitutes one of the priorities, with actions aimed at expanding special education centers, creating new classrooms and reinforcing educational spaces dedicated to diversity attention.