Vicenta Pellicer, 60, a Valencian teacher at a public institute in Castellón, has lost 3,600 euros with the indefinite strike that began on May 11 and has ended. Pellicer had planned to renovate the bathroom in his house and change the computer, but he has postponed both expenses and is also planning an austere vacation. “It is a very large amount,” he says, “and it obviously affects my short and medium-term plans.” The impact on the home of Ismene Baños, a 39-year-old primary school teacher in Mislata (Valencia), will be greater. His partner is also a teacher, they have been on strike for 22 days, and they estimate that the bill will be close to 7,000 euros. “We have a reduction in hours to take care of our one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, but next year we are thinking of giving it up,” she says. And Cristina Arroyo, a child educator at a school in the Aluche neighborhood of Madrid, has accumulated 28 days of strike since April, which she estimates will reduce it by almost half, and has forced her to return to live with her parents at the age of 40. “If I normally have a hard time making ends meet, imagine now.”
The prolonged educational strikes that have marked the end of the school year in the Valencian Community, and Madrid (where it is limited to the first cycle of Infants, 0-3, but with union announcements to extend it to the entire public network in September) to demand have already implied a significant cost for the teachers who have supported them. And, on another level, also for students and families.
Teachers not only lose the money corresponding to days not worked, but also the proportional part of extra pay and vacations. “Even with the offer of a salary increase from the Valencian Generalitat, it will take years, because the increase is staggered, to recover it,” says Tàfol Nebot, a Technology teacher in Castellón, who estimates that he will lose 3,800 euros. With the added uncertainty, he says, that they do not know if they will be discounted in summer or Christmas, little by little, or all at once. A question that, when asked by this newspaper, the Valencian Ministry of Education did not answer this Wednesday either. “For us,” adds Manuela Morales, a Therapeutic Pedagogy teacher in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Barcelona (where, unlike in the Valencian Community and Madrid, the strike was scheduled by region, which has made it more sustainable), “the days of strike throughout the year will cost us about 2,300 euros, because my husband is also a teacher. But we have taken it as an investment for the improvement of education.”
For Julia Moreno, a 45-year-old vocational training teacher in L’Eliana, Valencia, the 17 days of strike she has been on have seen her savings cushion “for life’s unforeseen events” disappear. For Pablo Fuster, 31, a secondary school teacher in Albal, the 22 days of strike have delayed the possibility of stopping sharing a flat. And Marco Rolando, who has stopped for 20 days, has to pay the down payment on a home.
Effect on students
The harshness of the strikes – especially the Valencian one, aggravated by the first week of strike in the hope that the teachers would give up – has also had a cost for the students. There are first-year Baccalaureate students, like Marcos, 16, who on Tuesday was speaking with a colleague at the doors of the Benlliure Institute, in Valencia, worried about having lost a month of class in some subjects: “There are contents that we have not taught, such as derivatives, in Mathematics,” he points out. Marco fears that this will harm him next year in the university entrance exams, not only against students from the private school, where there has been no strike, but also against classmates from other groups at his own center, where monitoring has been less.
The impact on the kids has been uneven, says Toni Solano, director of an institute in Castellón. “It affects them more. Those who have a family behind them, and at home they can compensate, moving forward, reading or doing alternative activities, notice it less. And those who do not have that support, or their family does not have the capacity to substitute classes, suffer more. The most absentee students or those who were in a situation of social exclusion were the first to practically disappear from the center.”
Parents’ attitude
There are parents overwhelmed because their teenage children have disconnected from their studies, taking advantage of the situation in many centers and the nebulous parallel indefinite strike that the students called in Valencia. Or when you realize that your little daughters no longer want to go to class. Like Sandra Rodríguez, who takes her child, almost three years old, to a municipal Nursery School in Móstoles (Madrid) managed by a private company. “They have minimal services, and the routines have been lost in class. My daughter is mixed with children from other classrooms, and they have no support to change her diaper. Now, when I take her in the mornings, she has a hard time getting in and cries a lot; she rides her,” she says. The absence of his tutor for a month has also taken its toll, says Albert, on his two-year-old daughter, a student at the public school in a town near Valencia, where unemployment has been massive. “For her, going to school was exciting, and it is no longer exciting. What’s more, she doesn’t want to go. And at home we have noticed that she is more irascible. Things that didn’t affect her before now make her cry or bother her more.”
In the chats of parents in public education classes, voices critical of the strikes have emerged in recent weeks, but they have been a minority. . Just like Sandra and Albert do, who would subscribe to what Pablo Alcón, 42, a Mathematics teacher in Alicante, says. “I have two reasons to support this strike, because I am a teacher and I am a public school parent. And I think that, as a parent, I have even more reasons to mobilize and complain. We have a situation in public schools that neither gives dignity to those who work in it, nor to those who learn. And I believe that there are moments in which we have to decide what type of society we want for ourselves, for our children and for our fellow citizens.”
