According to the most updated calendar of the process that demunicipalizes the educational service and that involves the transfer of the administration of schools and high schools from the municipalities to the Local Public Education Services (SLEP), on March 1, 2025, the SLEP than Manquehue, who will manage the establishments of the communes of La Reina, Las Condes, Lo Barnechea, Providencia and Vitacura.
However, for some time now these communes – all currently led by opposition parties – have stood against the idea of expanding a process that today already has 15 SLEPs in operation of the 70 that the law dictates.
In the middle of an electoral year, it was the former Minister of Education Marcela Cubillos, who will go for the municipal seat of Las Condes, who announced at the beginning of April that she would take steps to avoid the transfer of, at least, the establishments dependent on the municipality that aspires lead. ““It is a very bad practice that schools that function as well as those in Las Condes have to be handed over to SLEP that are functioning as poorly as has been seen,” he said that time.
And today that promise goes one step further. And despite the fact that, as revealed at the time by the Ministry of Education itself, in the case of the SLEP Manquehue, it was being evaluated to postpone its creation and schedule it for the end of the calendar (2027, if the projections are met) because there were other territories with more needs to be transferred, that does not satisfy at least three of the mayoral candidates of the communes that will hand over their schools to the aforementioned Local Education Services.
This because Cubicles (Las Condes), the RN Felipe Alessandri (Lo Barnechea) and the UDI Jaime Bellolio (Providencia) decided to send joint signals regarding the issue and This Tuesday they carried out an activity around the issue in which they demanded that the municipal educational establishments of the communes of which they aspire to be mayors not be transferred to the SLEP.
Specifically, the candidates are not satisfied with the idea of delaying the transfer to which the Ministry of Education has already opened, but rather they intend for it to never occur. He also joins them in this offensive Sebastian Sichelcandidate for mayor of Ñuñoa, a commune that together with La Florida and Peñalolén make up the SLEP La Quebrada and whose creation is scheduled for 2025, with the transfer to take place in 2027.
“President Boric assured that the SLEP are going in the ‘right direction’ and that he is not going to ‘reverse’. If he wants to settle for mediocrity, it is his decision, but he does not have the right to continue dragging children and young people down that path. The Local Public Education Services have become the emblem of the irresponsibility and arrogance of the left,” Cubillos points out, adding that the candidates are going to “work together, together with the parliamentarians, to push for a counter-reform that prevents that municipalities that provide quality public education, like Las Condes, have their schools taken away. That is what the families of our commune want and we are going to defend them.”
The offensive by candidates from opposition sectors also occurs after several months in which the demunicipalization process in general has been questioned, something that occurred even more strongly after the severe crisis that occurred in the SLEP Atacama and that , among other things, stopped the implementation of this year’s Licancabur and Maule Costa SLEPs, and ended with the Mineduc presenting a project that attempts to improve the current law on public education and its corresponding transfers.
