The heat wave that hits the City of Buenos Aires once again exposed the building problems suffered by Buenos Aires public schools. The teachers unions and the educational communities of various schools denounced during this week the lack of ventilation in classrooms with temperatures that came to exceed 40 degrees of thermal. “Not all classrooms have a fan and in those that do, they do not work or are not enough.“, they assure and denounce that in some cases the schools do not even have water. Inside the schools, there were decompensated girls and boys who had to be withdrawn by their families. The unions ask that at least the provision of water for the students be guaranteed, and they call the teachers to denounce infrastructure shortcomings.
“The minimum conditions for children to go to school are not met“, sentence in dialogue with Page 12 Betina Silveiro, from the cooperative association of Normal N°1. The case of that school exposes what various Buenos Aires schools suffered this week. “Thursday was chaos. We started getting calls to withdraw the boys because they felt bad. Not only are the fans not working, but there is a workshop in the patio, so the windows cannot be opened and the children cannot go out into the patio. They are totally enclosed, with heat and without a fan, because not all classrooms have them and in those that do have them they do not work or are not enough. By not circulating the air they all begin to decompensate“, says Silveiro.
“While the head of the Buenos Aires government repeated campaign slogans, thousands of teachers and students in the city suffered from high temperatures, reaching the point of having to suspend classes in many schools“, warned for their part from the Multisectoral for the Public School, made up of student centers, the UTE-Ctera union and Cooperadoras en Movimiento. Last year, the Multisectoral had presented a report in which it already warned that more than 200 schools They had severe infrastructure problems. more than 20 percent of the total.
Pablo Cesaroni, a representative of Cooperadoras en Movimiento, now told this newspaper that “we are once again in a situation of building emergency In the city, there are hundreds of schools that have problems and lack of ventilation”. “This has several causes: the lack of infrastructure budget and that the claims of the educational communities are not heard are the main ones,” said Cesaroni, who announced that next Thursday the Multisectoral will meet to evaluate the action plan to follow.
The referent of the Multisectorial exemplified the situation that the schools are experiencing with the case of three schools in Almagro. In the classrooms of Normal No. 7, a building in which Commercial No. 8 and No. 25 also operate, and in which during the day there are around three thousand people, “all the fans are not working and it is unbearable to hold the classes”Cesaroni assured. School No. 23 of Almagro, meanwhile, this Friday had a phase without working and half of the school was without light. In School No. 10, for its part, “most fans not workingthey are dying of heat and at the same time with dust in the middle of the classes”, since there is also a work in progress as in Normal 1.
At the Higher School of Artistic Education Rogelio Yrurtia, the students made a “miss” this Friday given the situation they are going through. They assure that the fans do not work well and the heat becomes unbearable. At the Special Education School No. 7 in the Villa Soldati neighborhood, which could not start classes on Monday due to an invasion of rats, this week its workers had to withstand heat without means of ventilation: “In the middle of the heat wave, with 40° temperatures, the school doesn’t even have fans“warned the Special Education Commission of the Ademys union, which this Friday hugged the school.
In the union’s social networks they also collected complaints from other establishments with problems. In the case of School N°9 DE N°17, they assured that “the kids vomit from the heat and on top of that the menu is hot; there is no cold water for anyone and a fan barely works for a whole grade”. A video from School N°3 OF N°6 showed a single ceiling fan, slow, for an entire classroom. School No. 12 of Bajo Flores, meanwhile, was this Friday no provision of drinking water. The Mariano Moreno School, denounced Ademys, had this Friday three and a half days without classes, since I was without electricity or water. Other schools, such as 3 and 19 of DE N°20, 3, 6 and 19 of N°13 and 9 of N°17 were also without electricity or water.
The two unions coincided in this sense in claiming that the GCBA at least guarantee the supply of water to the students and to repair the fans that do not work. “Let it be guaranteed access to fresh water in all schools of the City and the immediate repair and tuning of ventilation devices in each school,” UTE-Ctera requested in the Multisectoral statement. From Ademys, meanwhile, they demanded, “urgently“, the sending of “water to all the schools and the repair and Conditioning of everything necessary to be able to teach and learn“.
The Secretary of Conditions and Environment of UTE, for its part, prepared a model of minutes so that teachers can report to the supervision the claims for “high temperatures“. “We found that the conditions to guarantee ventilation and air conditioning are not met in the establishment”, reads, among other things, in the minutes that are already beginning to circulate in schools.
From Normal 1, Silveiro says that they have already raised notes to repair the fans, but did not get the expected response. “We sent a note for maintenance to come to fix the fans. The authorities replied that the fans They were going to arrive this week but they still haven’t arrived. There are no solutions and next week will be worse”, she assures. At school, the week ended with a new power outageso families had to return to withdraw their sons and daughters earlier than expected.
