Gioia Lazzo was shopping at Lidl on Monday last week when she saw a product she needed, an awning. It wasn’t for her house, but for her nine-year-old daughter’s school. She grabbed her phone and notified her colleagues from the family association.
“Sorry if I haven’t consulted you,” he wrote, “I’ve picked up three awnings for next year.” About 45 euros.
The answers came instantly.
—Great 🙂
-Perfect!
We are in the middle of the season. There is a lot of talk about the purchases that parents make each year in August and September for back to school, but less about those they have to make in May and June, when the end of the school year is approaching. The heat is on, the children get dizzy in class and the authorities don’t even flinch. It’s time to ask for quotes and solve the problem in the classrooms and playgrounds: a ceiling fan costs around 100 euros; an air conditioning unit, about 1,500 euros; and cover 147 square meters of a patio with awnings, almost 7,000 euros…
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In addition to those three awnings, Lazzo and his colleagues from the AFA have bought two ceiling fans for the classroom of the three-year-old children, the youngest in the school. They paid 275 euros in some well-known DIY stores. This Saturday they hope to install another seven of the same model. Its center is the Guindalera Early Childhood and Primary Education School (CEIP), one of the three public schools in the Salamanca district of Madrid. They consider themselves privileged because parents here have more resources than in other areas of the community.
But even so, the 400 Guindalera students are very hot. This Thursday it was 32 degrees at 1:00 p.m., the end of school. Aemet had declared a yellow warning due to high temperatures. Some children came out the door with their heads covered by caps and bathing with fluffies, the typical water sprayers found in hair salons. One carried a mini fan in his hand.
A little earlier, a mother who was visiting the school with a future five-year-old student collapsed due to lipothymia in the middle of the playground while talking with the director, Beatriz Sánchez. Making it to the last day of school, June 21, seems like a task of survival.
Madrid parents like those from Guindalera are paying out of their own pockets for expenses that do not correspond to them. They take these desperate measures because they have spent too many years watching their children study in classrooms at more than 30 degrees and in some cases suffer from heat stroke, but there is almost never a response.
In Madrid, the administration with educational powers, the Government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso has not even mapped the resources against the heat of the 2,264 centers supported with its funds. In the last two years, 35 schools and institutes have benefited from 38.2 million euros in regional investments against heat, according to the Community of Madrid. It is a figure that seems minuscule compared to the large number of centers under his responsibility, many located in old buildings, poorly prepared for the current serious climate problem.
In centers where no one acts against the heat, parents take the reins, as also happens in other autonomous communities. The associations of mothers and fathers (AMPAS) have a small budget from voluntary fees that range between eight and 15 euros per year and from parties with raffles in which they sell t-shirts or sandwiches. This money is usually used for extracurricular activities, such as buying a tatami for the karate course or Pilates balls for rhythmic gymnastics.
Bureaucratic labyrinth
Before making the decision to allocate these funds to school infrastructure, parents have often spent years lost in a labyrinth of bureaucratic inaction. The center management has its own budget, assigned by the Community of Madrid, which is usually insufficient for extraordinary expenses. They have to ask the administrations for help, but at that point the confusion begins, explains the president of the Federation of Associations (FAPA) Giner de los Ríos, Mari Carmen Morillas. According to the theory, the town councils are in charge of maintaining the infrastructure in the schools and the Community is in charge of the institutes. In practice, these two administrations sometimes pass the buck to evade responsibility.
“They make us dizzy and exhaust us,” says Luis Alonso, the president of the AMPA of a school with 250 students in the center of Madrid, the CEIP Vázquez de Mella. “You send letters and they tell you that they are not competent or they don’t answer you. Months and years go by…”
In their case, the parents started the battle eight years ago. Every beginning of the school year they raise the problem of the heat and nothing is ever done, says Alonso. The last straw is what has happened to them this year. They had a project drawn up by several architect parents to install a 240-square-meter awning on a south-facing cement patio that is “a chicharrera.” A company gave them a budget of 6,954 euros that they presented to the school, but the Territorial Area Directorate (DAT) of the Ministry of Education vetoed it for security reasons.
This week they wrote a letter of complaint to the DAT that they shared with this newspaper: “We are not interested in administrative intricacies or competition dances. We are talking about the health and safety of minors during the school day. Every day we leave our boys and girls in the hands of the Community of Madrid who, therefore, are under THEIR RESPONSIBILITY and must seek the necessary means to guarantee minimum conditions; They should have looked for them a long time ago. We will not tolerate that this negligence could result in serious situations for which we hold them entirely responsible.”
The parents of a school in Carabanchel, the CEIP Lope de Vega, managed to install an awning for about 250 euros a couple of years ago. But a municipal technician warned them that it had not been “approved” by the City Council and ordered them to remove it under warning of a fine. The AMPA began a complaint campaign and they got the DAT, the following year, to install three awnings: one in the hallway, one in the sandbox and another in the back yard. But they are very small.
“This depends on the pressure that parents put on each school,” says Rubén Lorenzo, from the AMPA of this center. “We are lucky to have a strong and committed association, but other schools, perhaps 80% or 90%, are more vulnerable.”
This problem has become pressing recently. Veteran teachers say that two or three decades ago the heat was much less of a threat. Temperatures did not usually exceed 32 degrees in May or June and school holidays lasted longer. But the centers are now open almost all year round in the search for family conciliation. In many of these schools without resources against the heat, school camps are held in July and August.
In the absence of reforms, the 2024 plan for episodes of high temperatures in the Community recommends changing schedules, fresh clothing and drinking water. Parents and teachers are outraged that urgent action is not taken. The FAPA Giner de los Ríos has joined forces with the CC OO and UGT unions and with the Regional Federation of Neighborhood Associations to change the law. They hope to collect 50,000 signatures before June 21 for a Popular Legislative Initiative that would mean investments against the heatincluding a plan to remodel buildings so that they meet the highest energy efficiency standards.
At the CEIP José María de Pereda in Leganés they bought air conditioning units for the grad room because the June graduations had become an unbearable event. The family association paid for a pair of these devices a decade ago and a couple of years ago the school bought a third, also for that same room. They have not been able to air-condition other parts of the building because neither the parents nor the school can afford more. “The poor are in the classes roast. It is quite hard and unbearable,” says Sara Sanz Gutiérrez, treasurer of the AMPA. “In the offices there is air conditioning, but no one thinks about the children.”
When schools allocate their own funds to these resources, they have to sacrifice other items. The director of Guindalera, Beatriz Sánchez, says that they have financed some awnings with their budget of 14,000 euros. From the outside, the building seems incomplete, with awnings scattered haphazardly across the windows. “It’s a lot of money,” explains the director. “Our budget is allocated for teaching materials.” To make this effort they have had to limit spending on library books.
The president of the AMPA, Lazzo, appreciates the involvement of the management. In other schools they complain that the board of directors turns its back on them and seems to protect the interests of the department. Based on joint pressure, they managed to get the City Council to pay for some awnings for the patio last year, but most of the outdoor space remains uncovered. And in the classrooms the temperature exceeds 30 degrees.
They tell it while a teacher invites this newspaper to see her classroom, which she calls “my oven.” Here, in conditions unbecoming of a developed country, Madrid schoolchildren try to learn.
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