The teachers of Vitoria-Gasteiz have complained that they have not seen any means or planning to do education electronically. On the contrary, the Basque Government has suspended the recruitment of substitute teaching staff. “Those of us who continue to work have used every means at our disposal to guarantee the right to education: extra hours, adaptations, telephones and own digital resources, adaptation to special needs and domestic situations... And yet, we have had to receive insulting messages from some of those who are heads of government, ‘like the rest will have to go back to work’, among other things.

They have denounced that, even when the centers were called from the Basque Government, no concrete plan was made and that the health plans were left to staff and management teams. “In the face of the lack of resources, they proposed to bring the computers and phones from our house to school. Are they not enough three months to predict the planning of a return?”

Halfway ratios, adequate resources and community participation

To ensure that this does not happen again, the teachers of Vitoria-Gasteiz have made concrete proposals. Set up the Substitution Centre (system of recruitment of substitute teaching staff) normally; cut ratios by half; stimulate the recruitment of teachers to meet special educational needs; provide for and guarantee sufficient resources (computers, additional classrooms, use of open spaces and human resources); a clear proposal of the resources needed to ensure telematics education, “to cater for workers and families and to avoid the digital divide”; gather the largest possible information community.

“It’s no good to send us back to school without having proposed any plans from the counselor. It is no use to re-entrust management teams and staff who are not prepared to design epidemiological burden management and the responsibility to open educational centers.”

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Absurd and undiscussed measures

In the same vein, a group of professors from the Oriarte BHI center of Lasarte-Oria has denounced that COVID-19 has increased a previous situation: “In general, increasing demands, and the growth of obligations that are not seen – above all administrative tasks – with little human and material resources, to the detriment of our true mission: teaching.”

In the pandemic situation, they have criticized that the administration has taken absurd measures, that the capacity and responsibility of teachers has been questioned, that the opinion of the educational community has not been taken into account when deciding how to manage the school in this special situation, and that information has come on several occasions from the media. “To you, who are managers of a sector as important to society as Education, it is up to you to value the role of teachers and, to a large extent, we think that you have not done so in this health alarm. We do not need recognition or recognition, but we consider it essential to have proper and minimal environmental planning so that the daily work is carried out with full guarantees and the students receive a quality education”.

“We look forward to strong institutional support”

Like the teaching staff of Vitoria-Gasteiz, those of Lasarte-Oria have also shown their concern for the next course. They ask: resources and technological training, reasonable student ratios, adequate number of teachers and priority of classroom work to the detriment of online work so that the workload does not multiply. “And above all,” they say, we expect strong institutional support.”