The Provincial Director of Education, Elena Fernández Treviño, attended this morning the presentation of the 17 school nurses who begin working today in all the public and concerted centers of Infant and Primary Education of the city. Along with them, the 25 caregivers who will attend to students with special educational needs have also been incorporated.
Fernández Treviño has defended that the educational context is a “privileged context to face precisely this care for equity, for health, especially from the earliest ages”.
Health care and coordination
The Provincial Director recalled that this agreement was born from the collaboration between the Ministry of Education and the Autonomous City, with the aim of ensuring that each center has a school health care service. He explained that improvements have been made to the agreement and the working conditions so that the staff has adequate spaces and can attend to the students in the best circumstances.
He has also detailed that the coordination of this service will be carried out by a professional with more than twenty years of experience in the Queen Sofia Special Education Center. In addition, a training course is being offered at the Reina Sofía centre itself to facilitate the integration of new staff in schools and to strengthen coordination with families.
Inclusion of students with special needs
With regard to the caregiver agreement, Fernández Treviño has stressed its essential nature to guarantee the full inclusion of students with serious autonomy difficulties. “We are not just talking about accompaniment, but about ensuring that the educational system remains on an equal footing,” he said.
The 25 carers join the staff of the Ministry and other specialized professionals (PT, AL, TEA classrooms, open classrooms), which forms a broad support device for special education in Melilla. “We are aware of the diverse and special education and there is a whole team attending to this students,” he said.
The Provincial Director also recalled that three new open classrooms are being launched, within the framework of the Ministry’s objective of moving “towards total inclusion in a horizon of about 8 or 10 years”.
In the words of Fernández Treviño, “this Government and the Ministry of Education has a clear idea of what inclusion means. It’s not including, it’s belonging. Diverse students belong to the society we are. We are all diverse and we all have diverse capabilities and we are very clear that the inclusive model is the model that it should be”
“Right now in the open classrooms or the TEA classrooms the students enter and leave those classrooms to join the ordinary classroom in certain subjects with the rest of their classmates,” he explained.
However, he pointed out that the goal is that in the future “these personnel go to the ordinary centers and, in addition, to the ordinary classrooms, attending it with co-teaching, with shadow teachers, with specialists of Therapeutic Pedagogy”, so that “as far as possible, those classrooms that are outside the ordinary classroom cease to exist”.
A competition specific to the Autonomous City
The Provincial Director wanted to make it clear that this agreement falls within the competences of the Autonomous City of Melilla in educational matters, as stated in the BOME.
“The bottom line is that all administrations, in the exercise of their own – not improper – competences, improve the education and attention of our students,” he said. In this regard, he stressed that the Autonomous City “can and must agree in educational matters with the Ministry of Education.”