“We are tired of studying surrounded by rat poop” said Germán, a student at Normal 1 Lenguas Vivas, located on Av Córdoba 1900, who, like the rest of his classmates, is demanding an urgent solution from the Buenos Aires government. “It’s something that always happens. If we didn’t receive help from the State before, we’ll get even less help from Macri now.”, he adds. The families and students hugged the building so that the Government of the City of Buenos Aires (GCBA) carried out a deep deratization throughout the building. This school, along with hundreds of Buenos Aires educational institutions, go through the same situation every year.
In Normal 1 the waters are divided. An important sector of the educational community decided to make the fact visible, and another prefers to wait for the Buenos Aires Executive to act in good faith and finally solve the problem.
“As fathers and mothers of boys and girls who attend different levels, we want to join the cooperative’s requests from families to eliminate rats and improve daily cleaning so that we can rest assured that our sons and daughters are studying in decent conditions,” they highlighted. a brief statement from the members of the Normal 1 cooperative. “We demand that the government of the city of Buenos Aires, Jorge Macri and to the Ministry of Education, to arbitrate the necessary mechanisms to resolve this situation urgently! And we ask the families to join our claim,” he concludes.
The problem of rats in the city’s schools
From the rectory they assure that since the appearance of the rodents they have raised all the corresponding complaints and that, despite carrying out two monthly rat exterminationsthe situation is getting worse day by day.
«We always had problems with rats at the entrance to the warehouse, all the food we left from suppliers. Generally everything that is a kiosk, cookies, alfajores and sweets. We kept the rest of the food in refrigerators, so nothing happened to it,” Martín Vega, who until a few months ago worked at the Normal Buffet, told Tiempo.
In order to get to the food, the rodents chewed through the boxes and ate several of the products in the warehouse. “We had to throw everything away. The buffet is run by a cooperative that does not receive help from the State. We asked several times for it to be fumigated, and it was not fumigated and when it was done it was not fumigated as it should have been because the rats always appeared,” he added.
The presence of these vermin in schools in the City of Buenos Aires is a problem that the GCBA cannot or does not attempt to solve. So much so that in 2023, Buenos Aires legislator Laura Velasco prepared a “Map of the Rat in CABA Schools”, to unify all complaints from the educational community. Until the middle of that year, the presence of rodents was confirmed in more than 120 Buenos Aires educational establishments, despite various pressures from the GCBA to prevent these complaints from becoming public. A few months later more than two hundred schools had made the same complaint
Some of the schools in Buenos Aires that reported the presence of rats are: Kindergarten No. 03/16 Mafalda; School No. 2 DE 21, Eduardo Luis Vicente; Primary School No. 06 Manuel Dorrego; Primary School No. 16 Jose Maria Ramos Mejia and Primary School No. 12 DE 19. Among others are School No. 4 DE 16 Alvarez Thomas; Primary School No. 17 Blas Parera; Normal Superior «Lenguas Vivas», No. 1; EEM No. 2 DE 19 Arturo Jauretche and School No. 3, DE 16.
