In Mendoza there are very different realities between some families and others but many face the same difficulty: reaching the school to learn or to teach is more difficult every day. Whether for economic reasons or because the educational establishments are in remote areas and the bus does not arrive, families fight every day to maintain the right to education in the midst of the crisis.
Families who live in the City or nearby areas but who send their children to more distant schools, families who do not live so far from the schools of their children but because of the areas and the insecurity they cannot walk there and they cannot afford the ticket either, families that are dedicated to raising animals but live separately, some days at the post and others in the town house, so that their children have the right to education. Teachers who do not have their own mobility to get to their workplaces but do not have buses to take them to and from their homes to schools every day.
In shelter schools and some that operate during the day, in remote districts, they have transport own, the transport school as it is commonly called. But there are others that do not have this service and depend on the transport public.
“In the dry land of Lavalle the transport “It’s a disaster,” says a teacher. “Everyone thinks that they are all shelter schools for the rainfed and there are three schools that are not shelters, which are El Cavadito, La Majada and El Puerto. They are day schools. , like a school normal where kids go from Monday to Friday,” he explains.
The theme of transport In the districts of Lavalle, as in those of other departments, it is complex. In some places, the bus arrives only once a week or every fifteen days. This is the case of the community of El Puerto, located on the border with San Juan, 145 kilometers from the City of Mendoza. “I understand that now the buses go there once every 15 days that enter San Miguel and return. There are teachers who, due to the salary we earn, which is very low, cannot afford the fuel costs to travel in private cars every day. So, for example those of El Puerto, which is the school The further away it is from the Iscamen phytosanitary control, they stay in houses there during the week,” he says about the reality of rural teachers.
The initial level teacher from a Lavalino district details that “the principal stayed in a building that was half old, like a community center that was left there to be built, and the teachers, I think, one stays in a student’s house and the other in the house of a guard. They stay there from Monday to Friday living there with the people of the community and then they only come on the weekends. Or maybe they will return one day but it is impossible due to lack of transport public to be able to get to work every day. So they have to stay.”
In the countryside it also happens that families resort to having two houses, but these are not people with high purchasing power who choose to live in one one day and the next week in another. Quite the contrary, what happens is that they have a remote position, where they work and have a house in the town. “Then families live half separated,” says a resident of Jocolí, reflecting how productivity and the rights to education and housing often clash.
Another issue is that of fertilizers, he told MDZ a father and a director from different schools in Greater Mendoza. Schools receive money from the DGE to support some students with school passes, in addition to the half ticket that is for everyone. With the increase of transport public this amounted to amounts between $6,000 and $9,000 per student, says a director of a school central, when a student to go and return all month – approximately 25 days – has to spend $13,750 on urban buses.
After a complaint led by parents and schools that do not have transport own, the DGE updated the amounts. “It recently accompanied the increase in the ticket with a 175% update in the amount,” they point out from the educational portfolio and add that, in addition, “student coverage increased by 30%.”
However, a mother of three children also says that her children do not receive that help. She is unemployed and together with her children and her grandson live in a settlement in Las Heras, near the Airport. Her children go to school school in the morning and at crisis economic situation is so difficult and the increase in the fare is often not enough to send them to classes.
“Children have to go, it is a right but what right can be fulfilled if it is not enough for the ticket. I have three children and I can’t send them every day because sometimes there isn’t enough to carry the bus,” the woman portrays.
