The members of Buenos Aires cooperatives questioned Acuña’s statements.
Families of cooperators called themselves this Friday at the Instituto de Enseñanza Superior del Lenguas Vivas, in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo, to repudiate the statements of the local Education Minister, Soledad Acuña, who affirmed that they carried out partisan politics and after listing the actions that They carry out for the right to public education asked that “hate speech against the community cease.”
“Soledad Acuña does not know the schools that she manages and in light of her recent statements in which she accused our cooperative of behaving as the manager or owner of the school and of being made up of families of a certain ideological profile, we find ourselves in need of clarifications,” said this morning, in a press conference from the door of Living Languages, Nancy Vegas, head of the cooperative of that school.
Vegas clarified that the cooperative is made up of fathers, mothers and relatives of school students “who dedicate voluntary time and their own resources to support needs that the State does not cover.”
“We manage the resources that we generate and that we receive from subsidies, but without profit or individual benefit; everything we do is for the school and the school community and is audited by the rectory and the Ministry,” he explained.
Then he indicated that “the error that the Ministry is forced to install, of confusing community political action with party politics, is because our cooperative does not respond to any party and people of multiple identities and political affinities live in it.”
The Minister of Education expressed, in a meeting broadcast from a video, that in the cooperatives of public schools “families are very strong and have a certain ideological profile, the conductions need more accompaniment from the Ministry. We try to accompany them so that they can go setting the limits.”
Vegas maintained that the cooperative maintains “with its own resources 70% of the current expenses of the school, given an increasingly scarce state subsidy.”
As reported, in 2022, the subsidy was 572 pesos per year per student, “a correlate of the reduction in the educational budget that has led to 16% of the total budget,” he said.
He also indicated that in 2022 they accompanied “the students in their complaint about the mandatory internships for being activities devoid of educational value and in the complaint about the terrible nutritional quality of the food.”
“We denounce the repressive protocol that led to creating black lists and sending police notifications to families in a reprehensible persecutory and criminalizing act that has not been experienced since the dictatorship,” he said.
Vegas recalled that this cooperator, like others, complained about the presence of pests such as poisonous scorpions and the chronically dirty state of this school.”
Meanwhile, the head of the Esnaola music school cooperative, Ani Meizoso, agreed with Vegas that the cooperatives “manage everything”,
“We buy the instruments with the contributions of the families. Without that we could not buy anything and there would be no instruments in a school that is dedicated to music,” he clarified.
“You cannot continue attacking the organized community, the people who put their soul and heart into the right to education. Enough, Minister. Stop the hate speech, manage as you have to manage, you are the Minister of Education, We are families that are at the foot of the canyon, free of charge, for the right to education for all boys and girls”.
The representative of the Multisectorial for the Public School, Pablo Cesaroni, recalled that about 400 Buenos Aires educational buildings have infrastructure problems, rats and other things, out of 950.
“The minister would have to solve this and not attack the cooperators, because we are going to continue doing what we are doing, beyond a Law or beyond the anger of the minister,” he concluded.
