Another year, the group of OAEs, caregivers and caregivers of the San Antonio Special Education College, we must go out to make visible to the public opinion an alarming, serious and worrying situation. It is not a new situation, it is the scenario of continuous work, to which we have been subjected course after course for years, without any effective solution that can alleviate the urgency of caregivers in our center. This staff shortage results in an unsustainable workload which negatively impacts the quality of care, the performance of our job offer and, most importantly, the occupational health of the workers who make up this group.
Currently 134 students are enrolled in our special education center, distributed in 25 classes or units. The number of caregivers is 13. With a simple rule of three, we get that each caregiver takes care of more than 10 children. Keeping in mind that it is a student body that lacks personal autonomy, has serious affections, needs individualized attention, accompaniment in transfers around the center, nutrition, hygiene and personal hygiene, surveillance, vigilance and continuous care, etc …, the number of caregivers to meet all these needs is more than insufficient. To all this is added the fact that the sick leave of our group are never replaced or covered, aggravating the aforementioned shortage of staff.
The order EDU / 849/2010, of March 18, which regulates the organization of education for students in need of educational support in the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, in its Annex III, in the criteria for the procurement of resources, reads literally: “Special education centers will have the following personal resources: A specific activity manager (caretaker) for each unit with six or more students who do not have personal autonomy. In accordance with this Order, in our school there should be a minimum of 23 carers to meet the proportion established by the current educational legislation. This lack of resources, denounced ad nauseam by the entire educational community of our center, clearly jeopardizes a normalized school year in our school. Likewise, this disproportionate relationship presupposes an unsustainable workload for professionals, which negatively affects the quality of attention to diversity and represents an insurmountable obstacle to the principles of normalization and inclusion of students.
It is now, for lack of planning and efficiency of the administration, to cover this shortage of carers, (which is not new and denounced for many years by our group) and for the delay in the incorporation of the workers of the Employment Plan, that the problem we have been warning about for some time becomes visible: the unsustainable situation of caring for students with special educational needs, who need individualized and constant attention with an insufficient number of caregivers. The Employment Plan does not have to be the panacea for this staff shortage, nor can it be the interim patch for this great mess. Just as you cannot cover the sun with a finger, an Employment Plan cannot hide the urgency to cover, through the mechanisms provided for by our collective agreement for AGE personnel and by current legislation, the adequate number of caregivers who they need our center. Far from alleviating the supply needs situation, what has been achieved is a great direct dependence on this resource for the normal functioning of the classrooms and dining room, creating a harmful and addictive “boomerang effect”. Likewise, we disagree with incorporations, through a minor contract and through a private company, which promote the invasiveness of work practiced in mainstream schools, which have students with special educational needs, as specialized carers must be hired for such work. and formats. and having passed the respective opposition insolvency procedures, as we all did at the time to fill our positions and as sanctioned by the IV Single Collective Agreement of the AGE Staff
By way of important information, on a comparative level, in the 2010/11 school year our center had 118 students and 21 carers, this school year: 134 students and 13 carers. It can be deduced from these data that, currently, we sustain an unsustainable workload, attending between 2 and 4 classrooms per day per caregiver, which produces a discrepancy between the demand for work and the physical and mental resources of the worker to cope with it. , causing the worker a state of physical and mental exhaustion that directly and negatively affects our health.
For our commitment in our work and above all for the love we feel for our boys and girls, we employ a great dose of professionalism and selfless dedication, together with the help of the great professionals that our center has so that students are always leaving. with a smile and in perfect condition. But this situation of great pressure, unsustainable workload and duplication to serve several classrooms in a short amount of time and all this, for years, results in great work stress that severely affects the health of the workers we go from being human to having to become mechanical machines or “robots” to cope with this impossible and unsustainable workload, reported and alerted for years. We hope not to have to regret a misfortune or a sad consequence of this shortage of personnel and unsustainable workload resulting from a disproportionate caregiver / student relationship, of which we feel at the beginning of each school year, without obtaining a solution.
We have waited patiently and politely for years for this request to hire more health workers for our center to deal with, but we have always received a silent response and a minority of health workers. We do not exclude demonstrations, actions and all those measures offered by the law, aimed at asserting our rights as workers to carry out our duties in decent, fair and equitable working conditions.
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