Buenos Aires City Education Minister Esteban Bullrich yesterday acknowledged that some 7,000 children between zero and three years old will not be able to begin the school year at public kindergarten due to a lack of assigned vacancies.
Three weeks before the beginning of the 2014 school year, and on the verge of the February 7 registration deadline, Bullrich told local opposition leaders that an additional 4,000 elementary and high school students have not yet been assigned a school due to failures in the “bureaucratic forms of information processing.”
However, the PRO official made sure to highlight that the new online registration system implemented by the City administration was “successful.”
“Despite these mistakes, more than 100,000 students were registered, which means that statistically the system worked,” Bullrich told reporters during a news conference later in the day.
The official explained that the City’s goal is to reallocate those 4,000 students in schools that have available vacancies before February 14 and vowed to publish a list of those institutions in order to make proceedings easier.
‘A global solution’
Victory Front (FpV) City lawmaker Gabriela Alegre and her peer from the Workers’ Leftist Front (FIT) Marcelo Ramal — two of the 20 opposition leaders who met with Bullrich — criticized arguments from the PRO official.
“They’re offering a very vague response to parents, by not giving any global solutions but rather individual responses,” Alegre told state-run news agency Télam.
“Now they’re saying 4,000 students were given a vacancy in December only to be later removed from the list.”
A spokesman for Bullrich told the Herald that several parents were preliminarily assigned a place “in error,” because current regulations give priority to students already attending the school or with siblings who are already there. In those cases, slots “had to be taken away and reassigned to another student.”
Ramal, for his part, said that there is still “no way out for 17,000 families,” taking into account the 11,000 students who had problems with the online registration system plus another 8,000 who — he argued — did not finish the registration process because they decided to send their children to private schools.
“If this goes on like this, lots of families will end up sending their kids to private schools, therefore encouraging the privatization of education,” Ramal said.
Compulsory levels
The National Education Law establishes that compulsory attendance should begin at age four, but the City Constitution declares there is a right to education beginning at 45 days.
“No government has achieved this so far,” sources from the City Education Ministry acknowledged.
However, Bullrich argued that City governments preceding the current PRO administration were even less inclusive.
“In 2007, there were 45,956 assigned vacancies in kindergarten, now we have 55,607 — a 20 percent growth,” the minister said.
According to official sources, between 7,000 and 9,000 zero-to-three-year-olds will not be able to begin the 2014 at public kindergartens — a long-term problem that gained visibility following the problems with the newly-implemented online registration system.
Herald staff with Télam