ARCHIVED - Bumpy start to school year in Murcia region
280,000 students will return to school this week
On Monday 100,000 of the 280,000 students who will return to school this week began their autumn term, although the return to school has been rather fraught due to issues regarding the provision of both school buses and auxiliary teachers.
On Monday the regional ministery for education suspended the contracts of ten companies providing school bus services after they failed to turn up and collect their assigned pupils.
The bus companies concerned say that contracts for this new school year have not yet been formally awarded and the Regional Federation of Organizations and Transport Companies of Murcia (Froet) which represents the bus transport sector maintains that these companies have not yet been sent "contracts to provide transport service to public centers."
Without contracts they say, companies have no guarantee that they will be remunerated for their services and cannot raise invoices.
The educational department has been attempting to introduce a new "Acuerdo Marco" to cover the bus concessions, but due to negotiations failing to run smoothly, no contracts have actually been issued.
The education department responded by claiming that the contracts agreed in 2009, in spite of now being out of date remained in force, as "all the contracts for the provision of the school transport service in 2009 are in force, as a consequence of the extension of the execution period of contracts under article 34.4 of the Real Decree 8/2020, of March 17, relating to extraordinary urgent measures to manage the economic and social impact of the Covid pandemic.”
For this reason, they said, the companies “that have not presented themselves today to provide the service of the contracted routes have breached their contract, preventing the normal attendance of students at their educational centres and, therefore, depriving them of their fundamental right to education," they added, promptly issuing an order to “cancel” all of the contracts which the bus companies say they have not been given in the first place.
The Ministry then went on to say that new contracts of an 'emergency nature' were being issued to ensure that all routes were covered on Tuesday and apologised to disgruntled parents.
As it turned out, not all of the temporary contracts were honoured as the bus companies contracted for Tuesday claimed that they had been threatened if they took the contracts on and the situation was even worse on Tuesday, an estimated 90 per cent of bus companies refusing to collect pupils in protest against the situation.
The second issue relates to the provision of teaching support staff.
During the Covid pandemic the regional authorities took on 1500 covid reinforcement teachers, but has decided that these are surplus to requirement in this academic year and will not issue the additional contracts.
Other regions of Spain have opted for maintaining a higher ratio of teachers per capita of pupils in order to support teachers, and the decision has been criticised heavily by the unions and bodies representing teachers, who feel that the addditional burden placed on teaching staff as a result of the Covid pandemic requires the additional support of further reinforcement teachers.
"This inequality in the hiring of teachers will affect equal opportunities for students,"said a representative of the association of managers of public centers in the Region of Murcia, and these sentiments have been echoed by other bodies, all criticising the teacher/pupil ratio, class sizes and lack of teacher support in the coming year.
This week the return to school continues and although in most municipalities the “vuelta al cole” proceeded smoothly, it’s certainly been a bumpy start to the new term for the regional education department.
Image: Pupils in Jumilla happy to be backj at school. Ayto. Jumilla