Nueva Canarias-Bloque Canarista (NC-BC) of Teguise expresses its deep concern about the situation at the Tahíche Special Education Center, a fundamental resource for numerous families in Lanzarote who have been enduring increasing saturation for years without public administrations being able to offer a definitive solution.
As the families themselves have denounced, the center was designed to accommodate about 60 places, and currently around 100 students are enrolled, a figure that is expected to continue increasing next year. This reality has generated evident pressure on facilities that were designed for a much lower capacity and which today present significant limitations in adequately meeting the needs of the students.
For Belén Machín, local secretary of NC-BC in Teguise, “we consider it especially serious that, after eleven years of claims and demands from families and the educational community, the situation remains unresolved. It is even more worrying to see how projects announced to address this need have been paralyzed while the administrations involved continue to pass the responsibility back and forth”.
The recent controversy surrounding the impossibility of carrying out new expansions or enabling additional spaces once again highlights the absence of a clear strategy and the lack of institutional coordination to face a problem that was perfectly known and foreseeable.
For Machín, “this situation shows a worrying lack of planning by the Teguise City Council. The obligation of any public administration is not only to point out administrative or urbanistic obstacles, but to lead solutions, coordinate efforts, and defend the interests of the citizens, especially when the rights of people with disabilities and their families are at stake”.
The Canarian politician continues by stating that “it is not acceptable that, a few months before the start of the next school year, there continues to be uncertainty about the center's capacity to absorb the increase in students under adequate conditions. Nor is it admissible that families have been listening to announcements and promises for more than a decade without a definitive response to an evident need materializing”.
For this reason, NC-BC in Teguise demands that the City Council, the Government of the Canary Islands, and the rest of the administrations involved abandon the exchange of responsibilities and act urgently to resolve a situation that admits no further delays.
Likewise, they demand the immediate convening of a working group among all competent administrations and representatives of the families, with the objective of establishing short-term solutions for the next academic year and a clear, public, and verifiable roadmap for the definitive expansion of educational infrastructure for students with special educational needs.