Iparralde students and teachers have started the course 2023-2024 and the main innovation of Seaska has been the opening of the Kattalin Elizalde School next to Lake Senpere. A total of 82 students from the 5th and 6th grades, aged between 11 and 15 years, were included, divided into four classrooms. “We are ready to enter into good conditions,” Director Iñaki Lekuona and President of the Mixel Bidegain Association of Parents in Euskal Irratia reported in late August.

Hitherto, Seaska students from neighboring towns went to Piarres Larzabal School in Ziburu, but as they are small, they have built in Senpere a school with capacity for another 150-200 students. Seaska has experienced remarkable growth in recent years, and Bidegain and Lekuona have highlighted two reasons: parents’ willingness to grow up in Basque, and Seaska and her parents are doing well. “Schools are a tool to develop and strengthen Euskera. The students of Kattalin Elizalde School will be in the decision-making centers, in favor of the Basque Country within fifteen years”, they foresee.

For seven months, Bidain and Lekuona have explained the speed: “We have seen that parental involvement and mobilization bear fruit.” They say that by the end of December the school will be almost complete. Once the first phase has been completed, the doors have been opened: four rooms, administration rooms and dining rooms. They have warned that for six weeks the students will have “a reduced space”, but in the second phase they will open a large refuge and rear sports halls. Finally, in the third phase the sports area will open.

Less than half in Basque

Of the 11,028 first-year students from Lapurdi, Nafarroa Beherea and Zuberoa 3,795 will work this course in the Basque immersion model and 6,966 students in the bilingual model. According to data from the Directorate of the Department of Atlantic Pyrenees of the National Organisation of French Education Kazeta.eus it has collected it.

Secondly, 1,069 students will participate in the immersion model, 786 in the Basque option and 2,205 in the bilingual option. When they reach the high school, they learn less Basque: 227 in Basque, 668 in bilingual and 485 in immersion.

Another novelty of the 2023-2024 course is that the low has been delayed from March to June, returning to the previous model, according to the French Minister of Education, Gabriel Attal, at the end of August.