One of the objectives of the 2020 state education law, the Lomloe, is that children enroll in the school closest to their home to guarantee a heterogeneous and equal distribution of students and thus reduce school segregation. This academic year, the Murcia Department of Education eluded the delimitation of school areas, maintaining a single district in each municipality, advancing the process of admitting students to mid-December (usually in March), a few days before the publication of the law in the State official newsletter. And for the next school year, Murcia has approved a regulation that allows it, in practice, to continue maintaining that single district in each locality and that has been described by parents’ associations and unions as a real “fraud of law.”
In the explanatory memorandum, the new student admission decree makes it clear that its “main objective” is to “guarantee the right to free choice” of school. And this is corroborated by the general director of Educational Planning of Murcia, Víctor Marín, who insists in any case that the norm scrupulously complies with the Lomloe, since proximity to the center is one of the priority criteria when enrolling (5 points), along with income level (3 points) and having other siblings enrolled in the same school (up to 11.5 points). State law says exactly: “When there are not enough places, the admission process will be governed by the priority criteria of the existence of brothers or sisters enrolled in the center; proximity to the home or place of work of one of their fathers, mothers or legal guardians and the per capita income of the family unit.
The point is that this maximum of five points for proximity can be received in practice by any family to access any school in their municipality, regardless of whether they live closer or further away, since the regional government reserves the delimitation of some areas of schooling that can continue to cover the entire locality. Thus, the decree establishes that the Ministry, “after hearing the local administrations, will define […] schooling areas and school zones”, whose amplitude will be determined by “the trend of schooling needs, urban characteristics, conditions of access and school transport, demographic evolution, the capacity of existing centers and the educational offer”. These criteria that determine the extent of the zones were not included in the first version of the text, which generated criticism from the Legal Council of the Region of Murcia, which required the autonomous community to specify the conditions, and made a warning: identify the school zone with the municipal term “makes the priority criterion of proximity absolutely inoperative”. The Ministry of Education introduced in the decree that recommendation of the Legal Council on the characteristics of the zones, but also an important nuance: each school area may be “a school zone by itself” or “be taken into account with other nearby areas to form their school zone. This means that the bordering school areas will form a large geographical area in which the score can be the same for everyone.
An area of more than 30 kilometers
For example, the capital of Murcia, where a third of the population of the autonomous community lives (that is, some 460,000 inhabitants): seven school areas have been established, but their expansion by uniting the areas close to each other gives rise to school areas “which have an extension of more than 30 kilometers”, explains the Councilor for Education of the City Council, Antonio Benito. “We have gone from the single district to the single district, it is a fraud of the law,” he warns emphatically. A similar opinion is held by José Manuel Fernández, head of the majority teachers’ union in the Sterm region, who considers that establishing such large areas aggravates the problem of the appearance of “ghetto schools”, which take in students with fewer resources, while other families they move to more distant centers to avoid them.
For Clara García Sáenz de Tejada, spokesperson for the Juan González Federation of Associations of Parents of Students, the majority in the autonomous community, with some 500 associated schools, this laxity in the zones also serves to promote private and concerted education, which has just for welcoming students from more affluent families and not those who live near those centers. They achieve this not only by giving the same score for proximity to students from other neighbourhoods, but also through the extra points awarded by criteria considered complementary: large and single-parent families, students with disabilities, parents who work at the center, students born in multiple births, victims of terrorism or gender violence or foster care, all of them contemplated in the Lomloe, to which are added two others provided by the Region of Murcia: request the center as the first option and comply with a criterion chosen by the own center within a list that includes being the son or brother of former students or attending a previous educational stage in the center. “When a student no longer receives additional points for living near the center and cannot receive them for complementary criteria such as these, the right to free choice of the center has been eliminated, because not all students can choose”, summarizes Nacho Tornel, Responsible for Education of Workers’ Commissions.
For the General Director of Planning, on the other hand, in no case is the appearance of these ghetto centers attributable to large school zones. Since the application of the single municipal district, he defends, 95% of families obtain a place in the center that they choose as their first option, which represents “a very high degree of satisfaction”.
In addition, it highlights that the Ministry of Education has been in accordance with the guidelines given by Murcia. During the period of allegations, the ministry requested several changes to the draft of the decree, mostly related to the score given to some complementary criteria in the scale, because they exceeded the score given to the priority criteria, something that has already been corrected. “In no case did the ministry refer to the zoning criteria that the Region of Murcia has chosen. The zones do not have to be incompatible with the freedom of choice and Lomloe herself collects both principles, and also the freedom of the autonomous communities to choose how to apply them”, ditch.
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