Parents gather at the doors of schools to demand the hiring of more specialists
The Platform No Child @ without ATE called yesterday concentrations in 32 Murcian educational centers to demand that they increase the number of educational technical assistants (ATE) for children with special needs. “We have concentrated in this way and not all together in Murcia so that the information reaches everywhere and so that parents who have a child with special needs know that the figure of the ATE exists,” explains LA TRUTH, Inmaculada Hellín Rubio , ATE and mother of a child with autism.
In the Region of Murcia, according to the data collected by the platform through the Plumier XXI portal of the Ministry of Education, there are 13,166 students with special needs -distributed between public centers (9,969) and concerted (3,197)- and 457 auxiliaries educational technicians.
The platform, which emerged after organizing a first concentration in front of the Concierge, on October 16, and did not receive a response, points out that there are two types of centers in the Region. Those in which there are technicians but they are insufficient and those that do not have any, as is the case of the CEIP Hellín Lasheras de Javalí Viejo, where the son of Inmaculada Hellín is enrolled. «We have three autistic children diagnosed in grade 3 –severe– and Carlos Garrido, general director of Attention to Diversity, continues to tell us that, as it is a very small school, with only three students it is not enough for there to be an ATE» , account indignant. «However, I am in a center where I work as an ATE and I take care of three children. And I have worked in some where I have cared for two. They have no criteria to choose where there is ATE and where there is not », she adds.
The assistants have to be distributed among several centers, so that the children are left unattended
“The problem is that in order to choose an educational center we have had to give up the ATE when it should not be so, because they are the rights of our children,” he denounces. He also believes that part of the problem is that autism is a more invisible disease and, therefore, “it remains in limbo.”
insufficient service
Apart from not having enough assistants to assist these students –who have one technician for every 29 children with special needs–, the service they offer is insufficient. There are centers where technicians are on sick leave and no replacement has been sought. In addition, most of these professionals are only contracted 25 hours a week and have to be distributed among several centers. Because of this, children do not have an ATE every hour they are in school but a few, sometimes even just one or two. «Some ATE have split shifts and can only spend 2 or 3 hours in one center and then go to another; and, when this happens, the teachers have to leave the class aside to attend to them, when it shouldn’t be like that », she adds.
From the platform, they also denounce that the last oppositions were in 2006 and the list of interims is “ultra mega finished”. Later they began to call people by the SEPE, but “not even with those do they cover all the squares.”
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