Some six secondary schools continued to be taken this Friday by their students and at least 15 schools maintained protest measures such as overnight stays and symbolic hugs demanding nutritional quality food, better building infrastructure and against mandatory labor practices in companies, while students and students from the Carlos Pellegrini Higher School of Commerce carried out a student strike.
The Escuela Normal Superior Lenguas Vivas Sofía Esther Broquen de Spangenberg -known as “Lengüitas”-, the Superior School of Artistic Education in Visual Arts Rogelio Yrurtia, the Juan Pedro Esnaola School of Music, the Rodolfo Walsh, the Technical School No. 6 Fernando Fader and Osvaldo Pugliese continued during the morning taken by their students, according to the latest list released by the Coordinator of Base Students (CEB) of CABA secondary schools.
At 11 a.m., the educational community of the Juan Pedro Esnaola School of Music, located at Crisología Larralde 5085, was preparing to give a symbolic hug to the building, while at 6 p.m. the Coordinator of Base Students (CEB), the Union of Secondary Student Centers (UNCes) and Renacer CABA called a press conference at Liceo 5 Pascual Guglianone, located at Carabobo 286, in the neighborhood of Flores.
“Once and a thousand times more, the students ask for an instance of dialogue in the Ministry of Education Now!”, said the student organizations in the summons to the conference in the afternoon.
The Higher School of Artistic Education in Ceramic Art No. 1 will also hold a symbolic hug to the establishment at 6:30 p.m. on 45 Bulnes Street, with the slogan “Enough of persecution and threats.”
This Thursday, the City’s Ombudsman’s Office summoned the Buenos Aires Ministry of Education, school directors and students to a meeting to “create a space for mediation and dialogue”, but the authorities of the government of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta were not present.
Meanwhile, the Secretary of Human Rights of the Nation presented a habeas corpus in Justice on Thursday to get the police officers to be removed from the doors of the Buenos Aires schools affected by occupations or other student protests, official sources reported.
For its part, the Carlos Pellegrini student center, dependent on the University of Buenos Aires, lifted this Thursday night the seizure that it maintained in “solidarity” with the claim of the CABA schools but voted in an assembly to carry out a student strike.
“The seizure is lifted to guarantee that the CIEEM support classes (entrance course) can be given. To continue the fight, we call for a student strike on Friday 9/30. The student center enters a state of permanent assembly,” communicated the CECaP.
The Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, the other traditional UBA school in the district, held an overnight stay on Wednesday in solidarity with the student protest that has been going on for a week.
Rodríguez Larreta: “Parents who support these violent measures will have to take charge”
The head of the Buenos Aires Government, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, described as “irresponsible” the parents who support the students who maintain the occupations in at least six secondary schools in the district, reaffirmed that “they are going to have to take responsibility for the damage that their children are provoking”, and described these protests as “violent”, although he minimized them by pointing out that they are “very small groups of students”.
“There are some schools in the City that are being taken over by very small groups of students, in many cases supported by irresponsible adults who today are taking away the right to study from almost 5,000 students,” Rodríguez Larreta said at a conference in press.
There, the head of the Buenos Aires Government and one of the referents of Together for Change emphasized that they are not going to “dialogue with those who annul the dialogue.”
In the press conference he gave at the Buenos Aires Ministry of Education, in Barrio 31, Rodríguez Larreta even stressed that, “with those who maintain the occupations”, the Buenos Aires management will be “inflexible” and added: “There is no dialogue before extortion”.
Rodríguez Larreta insisted on lashing out at the protest: “We are not going to allow small groups to set the pace of education in the city of Buenos Aires.”
Meanwhile, regarding the sending of patrol cars to occupied schools, the Buenos Aires Minister of Education, Soledad Acuña, maintained that “the police were not sent by any of the members of the Executive Power to the schools.”
“In the only instance in which the police had a role in taking over the schools was when the criminal and misdemeanor prosecutor’s office used and requested the service of notifying those families who had been denounced by the city government for being responsible for the assets, the security and the costs incurred by the State when there is a forceful measure such as the closure of a school,” Acuña said.
Asked about the judicial presentation in habeas corpus format made by the National Human Rights Secretariat to get the police officers to be removed from the school gates, Acuña maintained that “it’s nonsense, it has nothing to do with the situation, nor with the context, nor with the particular tool”.
At the same time, he considered that “closing a school by force, in a violent way such as a takeover, is an illegal act, and highlighted: “What we are doing is teaching children to live together in democracy through dialogue, through participation, but not through force”.
