Almost two months after the start of the school year, more than a thousand Murcian students are still without school transportation service. The students have been ‘trapped’ as victims of a problem that seems difficult to fix. Once the disagreements between the transport companies and the Ministry of Education were overcome, the Administration has not been able to allocate forty school routes because the companies do not have a fleet authorized to provide the service.
The vehicles that used the routes until last year have exceeded their permitted period of validity on the road, which in the case of buses intended for the transportation of minors is 16 years. Those buses benefited from an extension approved during the pandemic that expired on August 31. The expiration affected more than a hundred buses, and nearly forty have not been able to be replaced. In fact, the regional government and the transport association Froet have asked the Ministry to “extend the maximum duration of the vehicles that offer the school transport service, due to the current international socioeconomic crisis that results in increased costs and scarcity and complexity when acquiring new vehicles.
In this context, a thousand students remain without transportation service to attend their classes at school and institute, a situation that, in the opinion of the Federation of Student Parents’ Associations (FAPA) “is already unsustainable. They are being denied a basic right, that of access to compulsory education. Having the means to get to the educational center is essential,” claims the president of FAPA, Marisa Maldonado. The Federation of Student Parents’ Associations is studying with its legal services to take “the violation of that right to the Prosecutor’s Office.”
The FAPA is studying bringing to the Prosecutor’s Office what it understands as “a violation of the right to access to education”
While the parents of students make impossible balances to take their children to class, the Ministry of Education insists that they cannot do anything to encourage the hiring of the lines if there are no vehicles available. The counselor sent a letter this week to the ministers of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, Raquel Sánchez, and of Education and Vocational Training, Pilar Alegría, in which he requests the regulatory regulation of the temporary increase in the maximum age of the vehicles they carry school and minor transportation.
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