The great educational protest in the Valencian Community and Catalonia is not subsiding, quite the opposite. The center of Valencia has been taken over since mid-morning this Friday by thousands of teachers wearing green t-shirts who have come from all over the autonomous community on the fifth day of the indefinite strike to demand improvements in public education from the government of the Popular Juanfran Pérez Llorca. The teachers have gathered in the largest demonstration held during the week, in which more than 35,000 people participated according to the Government Delegation. In Catalonia, where almost daily strikes are called until early June, generally organized by regions, the main mobilization has concentrated in Lleida, where a group of teachers blocked traffic early on the N-240 by overturning containers, tables, chairs, and other school furniture. Their demands to the government of the Socialist Salvador Illa to improve the public system and teacher salaries, which are among the lowest in Spain, are quite similar to those heard in Valencia.
“The most important thing is that today families and students have joined us. Because this strike is not just for us, but for the children,” says Amparo, a 48-year-old teacher who has come to the Valencian capital from Picassent with several colleagues to join the protest. “We have classrooms with up to 26 students of different nationalities and very different educational needs. There are days when you get home and feel sorry because you think you have treated them like furniture, because you don’t have the hours to properly attend to all of them. I have been working for 25 years and I have never seen anything like this,” she states.
“We are here,” adds Valentí, a teacher at the Juan Ripollés public school in Castellón, “to prevent the dismantling of public education and the transfer of funds to charter and private schools. And why not say it, to improve working conditions, spaces, human resources, so that people who get sick are replaced, which is not happening, so that by September 1 all staff are already formed, which usually takes two weeks, and for the maintenance of purchasing power; it is being said that we want a salary increase when we have had a decrease in the last 9 or 10 years.”
The forcefulness of the protests led the Valencian and Catalan governments this Thursday to reopen negotiations with the unions. The meetings ended without agreements, but they agreed to continue talking next week. The Illa government sent a relatively optimistic message at the end of the meeting, pointing out that it saw room for an agreement. In Valencia, although there were no similar gestures, the Education Department officials committed to working all weekend to present a new proposal on Monday. And Llorca’s government is beginning to send alarm signals due to the wear caused by the protest when there are at most 12 months left until the regional elections. The Valencian strike is supported by all unions and, as happened last year in the great mobilization in Asturias, by autonomous assemblies that have emerged in the centers.
The administrations did not include, neither in the Barcelona meeting nor in the Valencia one, proposals for salary improvement. The unions in both territories put forward a long list of demands, which include reducing the student-to-teacher ratios, strengthening human resources to address diversity in classrooms, improving infrastructure, especially air conditioning, and, in the case of the Valencian Community, a change in the education law approved by the PP and Vox that has reduced the weight of Valencian in the system. But in both autonomous communities, the unions have warned that the salary issue must also be part of the agreement.
“We are one of the communities with the most students with disorders or vulnerabilities and this has an important impact in the classroom,” says Rosa Aguilà, spokesperson for the Ustec union in Lleida, the majority in the education sector in Catalonia. “You can have 25 students and 7 or 8 with needs, and the teacher is not an expert in language or special education. We need integrators, psychologists, and specialized staff to attend to students with needs so that the ordinary ones can also be attended to.” The strike participation this Friday in Lleida was 15.5%, according to the government, and 60% according to the unions.
Aguilà also regretted that the Generalitat did not include the salary issue in the negotiation table this Thursday. “If there was an opportunity to stop the strike, it was lost yesterday because the minister showed up with her hands in her pockets,” says the teacher, who considers the salary increase agreed so far, about 60 euros per month, “indecent.”
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