Alejandra Bastidas (Barquisimeto, 22 years old) was the best in her class when she graduated from school in Colombia. But neither her good grades nor her being carefree and talkative saved her from some suspicious glances or xenophobic comments. “People disliked him because he was very nerd. It also bothered them that a Venezuelan woman was doing well,” she says by phone, after leaving classes at the University of Antioquia, one of the best universities in the country, where she is studying the sixth semester of Food Engineering. “My mom had to listen to how the other parents said that how a veneca I could have had such good grades,” he recalls.
Bastidas is one of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans that the Colombian educational system has received since 2015, when the crisis in neighboring Venezuela intensified. Currently, there are more than 2.8 million Venezuelans in Colombia and, as of July 2024, 604,000 students born in that country were enrolled in Colombian schools, the majority in public institutions (84%) and in primary schools (57%), according to data from the recent report from the Educational Economics Laboratory (LEE) of the Javeriana University. In Colombia Any child from Venezuela, regardless of their immigration status, can enroll; In fact, this procedure activates the process to request a temporary protection permit (PPT), which makes it possible to stay in the country on a regular basis.
Despite this legal framework favorable to minors, and the Ministry of Education’s protocols that go in the same direction, children still face barriers. This is alerted by two recent investigations, that of the LEE and another of the universities of Rosario and Toronto (Canada)which focused on what is happening in Bogotá, La Guajira and Cúcuta, the territories with the highest number of migrants. Both studies put a magnifying glass on the country’s debts in structural inclusion, which provides access to educational institutions and services, and in relational inclusion, which guarantees the conditions of learning and coexistence.
Venezuelan boys and girls during a class in La Parada, in the north of the department of Santander, Colombia, in October 2021.Ivan Valencia (AP)
The investigations provide recommendations so that stories like that of Alejandra Bastidas, who arrived in Colombia in 2018, are not repeated. It was difficult for her to find a school in Medellín to attend tenth grade. In the private ones they asked for an immigration card and to take exams to certify their knowledge. They also suggested that he enter ninth grade to level up. Finally, a public school admitted her to the course that corresponded to her and gave her the opportunity to take the exams later, which would give her time to catch up on subjects such as geography or the history of Colombia.
It is not an isolated case. Venezuelan associations such as Colvenz y Funvenex They have received queries from migrants who have problems when registering their children. Arles Pereda, president of Colvenz, which operates in Medellín, explains that there are families who encounter school officials or directors who do not know the norm, and run the risk of leaving their children without studying. Maryuris Aguilar, who leads Funvenez, says that this year she detected in the municipality of Sabanalarga, in the Caribbean department of Atlántico, that several schools did not enroll children if they were not regularized. “It is key that the State trains officials, managers and teachers because, many times, they are the first responders when a Venezuelan comes to ask something,” says Aguilar.
Another challenge is to search for children who do not reach the system, a proactivity that the State does not always have: research from the Universidad del Rosario warns that there is little follow-up of out-of-school minors. And when they arrive, the researchers found the absence of a clear plan to address the deficits that many of them have, even though it is common because their school life has been interrupted by the situation in Venezuela and migratory movements.
Venezuelan Kimberly Gutiérrez helps her son with homework in Cúcuta, Colombia, while they wait for the school bus, in a file photograph. Matias Delacroix (AP)
In a few territories they are served with “flexible model” education programs, which are usually provided by international organizations. “The problem is that they depend on cooperative resources to function. That is why its continuity is uncertain,” explains Nathalia Urbano, professor of Sociology at the Universidad del Rosario. His colleague Claudia Díaz adds that there is a financing problem. “The Government has allocated basic basket resources to serve enrolled children, but everything else is not financed. That is, there is no money to pay for more teachers or more infrastructure if it is needed,” says Díaz. Furthermore, curricular integration is left to the will of the directors or teachers. “The ministry and the secretariats rely on the idea of curricular autonomy, so the pedagogical issue has little coordination,” explains Díaz.
Added to these administrative problems is a more cultural one: xenophobia makes migratory grief more difficult. Urbano, a professor at the Institute of Education Studies at the University of Toronto, warns that sometimes it even comes from teachers. “Some schools do not consider that there is xenophobia because, sometimes, it comes from microaggressions or violence that is not so obvious,” he says. And he adds that there is a policy that is more corrective than preventive in the face of discrimination.
Alejandra Bastidas hardly experienced curricular problems or lagging behind, because she had had a good education in a private school in Venezuela, but she did encounter discrimination. Remember that at school there were more migrant boys and girls, who chose to “blend in.” “They changed their accents, they used words from here, they didn’t talk about their things or their family there,” he says. “It’s not that I was strong, it’s that accents don’t work for me,” he says and laughs, “what else could I do? “I had to study.”
