The Mi Lado Azul association, which has more than 50 users in Tenerife South and which provides support, information and advice to more than 300 cases, presented on Thursday a letter of demands to the Canary Islands Government Education Department, guided and advised by the lawyer José Delgado Cuevas.
It is focused on general aspects and irregularities that are being carried out within the educational field, one of the main ones being the constant lack of resources to attend to ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) students and other students with special educational needs.
The Mi Lado Azul association expresses and demonstrates that the schools need more support staff, more qualified professionals to be able to equally serve all the students in the Enclave classrooms and those students who demand support in ordinary classrooms. He indicates that he urgently needs “more auxiliaries to achieve a real inclusion of all boys and girls with NEAE” (Specific Educational Support Needs).
He also values how the educational centers have produced an evolution “increasingly positive in attention to diversity”, but criticizes that the Ministry of Education does not support them or provide them with adequate resources to be able to attend equally to all children in Enclave classrooms.
The letter includes the inability to reconcile work of the families of students with disabilities, since, in the same educational centers, these boys and girls are not usually welcomed by early collection, permanence or dining services, especially those of the Enclave classroom, who even eat during school hours.
In the words of the president of the association, Carmen Fernández, “they cannot continue arguing that dining hours are part of the academic curriculum, in order to reduce the working hours of the assistants, when the rest of the boys and girls have his lunch hour outside of school hours. The same happens with all extracurricular services, they have to comply with the rights of equality of all the students in the center”.
“Families need equality in the schedules and extracurricular activities for their children, to be able to reconcile with their jobs, or to be able to work. They need to know that their sons and daughters are growing up in an educational system of equality and real inclusion,” said Marta Bajo, vice president of Mi Lado Azul.
Within the writing the training of classroom assistants is collected; the coexistence protocols of the educational centers without adapting to the disability; the constant complaints from parents that their children are changed in educational modality according to the existing resources and not in relation to the needs of the students; the increase in assistants within Enclave classrooms to fulfill its purpose of individualized attention; the disability places in professional training, and the lack of more stable personnel within the NEAE, so that you do not have to start each year from scratch.
My Blue Side Autism South encourages families to contact them to join a joint lawsuit.
