Teachers in Ceuta are “skeptical” and wary of the school measures announced last night by the Ministry of Education which, in theory, will “guarantee” that the return to class takes place under conditions of “safety” and “calm” next September 8.
Pedro Domínguez, head of the Anpe union in Ceuta, expressed his distrust of the school plan this Thursday in an interview on Onda Cero. “What safety can there be in the centers if there is no safety in the city?” he asked. “It does not inspire much confidence. We have doubts that it can be carried out.”
He recounted that groups of immigrants recurrently enter Ceuta schools at night to sleep and clean themselves, leaving damage and “health” problems. He added that the Ministry cleans the centers, but they enter again. He fears that this situation could repeat when the school year begins, September 1 for teachers and September 8 for students.
The Government has already ruled out housing migrants in school sports centers, as was its initial intention, and last night announced that it will place uniformed police at the school entrances, as well as private security inside. There will also be agents on school routes and at bus stops to monitor children’s movements. And it will deploy forces in the afternoons and nights to control that no new “intrusions” occur.
But teachers do not trust it. “One thing is to promise and another is to do,” said Domínguez. “This is not a normal situation. We are invaded, a month has passed and this cannot be maintained. People need protection to go to the store.”
He added that protests and gatherings are being organized in Ceuta to take to the streets in September because “no one is well” and “this is unbearable.”
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Families in Ceuta are also not very satisfied with the proposed school measures. Sofía Carrión, mother of a nine-year-old girl and creator of a family group on social networks that calls for delaying the start of the school year, denounces the lack of school buses in Ceuta.
“Safety is not just putting a guard at the door. There are not enough buses to absorb the current demand and much less to guarantee that all our students can travel daily to their educational centers under adequate conditions. And this especially affects students living in peripheral areas such as Benzú, La Loma, Arcos Quebrados, el Príncipe and other outskirts neighborhoods,” she explains.
Besides the security problem, the issue of schooling minors remains unresolved, and no one really knows how many there are. The latest figure is that there are 1,400 registered but the Minister of Economy, Carlos Cuerpo, spoke of a total of more than 2,900, while NGOs estimate around 4,000. Ceuta usually has 13,000 enrolled students and the vacancies available after the ordinary enrollment period are just over 1,500 if including Primary, ESO, and Baccalaureate.
Domínguez expressed doubts about how these children and adolescents will be schooled and the teachers and support staff needed to attend to them. “We have no guarantees that next weekend another 10,000 won’t appear. This number of people cannot be assimilated, the solution is not to put more resources,” he pointed out.
Still, he defended returning to school on the scheduled dates.
“I am in favor of parents taking their children to school and then we will see if they are safe or not and parents will contact the centers and organize themselves. I am very skeptical, but initially we all have to go to school and then we will see.”
