Colon High School 62, 2019. At the end of the morning shift, A student from the afternoon shift entered the building with her family, looking for a student from the morning with the intention of beating him. A seconded official and some students were injured. The conflict led to unemployment in Montevideo secondary education.
High School 4 of Las Piedras, 2022. In a literature class, which was being taught in the courtyard, two girls who were friends abruptly stopped being friends and became violent. They hit and pushed.
High School 41 of Cerrito, 2022. In the middle of changing shifts in the presence of students’ relatives, two armed persons appeared and threatened two students, they stole the cell phones and ran away.
High School 9 of Columbus, 2022. An 18-year-old former student entered wearing the high school uniform, He approached the bathroom when a student was coming in and said things to her bawdy. The girl, she said, told the deputy director. The police and the family were called, and the student was referred to the center’s psychologist.
Zorrilla High School, Rodó Park, 2023. WhatsApp messages between students: “Those from 5 gave it to the kid from the zorri (sic) last night and today two fleets got together to make trouble. And this will continue. They told the kid from the zorri that they are going to continue looking for him until you change high school.”
Zorrilla High School, 2023. The police arrested two minors and one adult in the middle of a fight at the door of the student center. They seized a replica of a pistol. The Prosecutor’s Office arranged to locate those responsible for the minors and prohibited them from coming within 200 meters of the Zorrilla high school and high school 5 for six months.
UTU Figari, in Barrio Sur. 2023. A student assaulted a 16-year-old classmate with a sharp object. The student was injured and the young man was arrested and later released.
High School 1, in Las Piedras. 2023. Generalized fight at the Manuel Rosé high school which ended in a town square, and in which the police had to intervene.
installed violence
“Youth violence did not start this week”, declared the Minister of Education and Culture, Pablo da Silveira, to Underline. In fact, the history of conflicts between students in educational centers can go back several years, just a quick search on the Internet is enough to find the most varied situations. The phenomenon is not new, but it has returned to the public agenda these days after several conflicts that went viral because they were recorded on videos. The specialists consulted agree that It would be difficult to demonstrate empirically that there is an increase in violence in high schools and they explained that perhaps social networks made them more visible.
Secondary does not have quantitative data on this phenomenon either. to find out if violence between students increased over the years or not. But in the Codicen believe that there is “installed violence” that is not necessarily generated in the educational center, but is “a consequence of social action,” said the Secondary Principal Óscar Yañezwho conveyed that the authorities are “concerned” because there are “a significant number” of student clashes.
Different actors linked to education consulted found some answers to this phenomenon that returned to occupy the agenda these days, after fights broke out at the Zorilla high school, at the 5 high school and at the UTU Figari. Among them, the Lack of psychologist in the three years of high schoolthat now the Board of Secondary Education plans to resolve.
Lack of psychologists
“As a general rule, there are no multidisciplinary teams in the Baccalaureate groups,” Camila explained. Menchaca, member of the National Federation of Secondary Teachers (Fenapes). The teacher and educational psychologist Mauricio Perpetue also explained that after the basic cycle there is no psychological support for students. And the psychologist and master’s degree in education Roberto Balaguer He opined that the presence of these professionals in the Baccalaureate “is not recommended, but is necessary.”
He Secondary Principal, Óscar Yañezresponded to the query about the lack of psychologists in those educational levels that There is a call to hire between 40 and 50 psychologists to cover all the high schools and extend attention to the Baccalaureate high schools.
Perpetue wrote in her master’s thesis on the Role of psychologists in high schools. In that job, he had a conversation with The Observercame to the conclusion that in Uruguay there is a lack of training in psychology and education. “These episodes occur and there is talk that there must be psychologists in high schools and as a policy it can be implemented or accelerated so that there are in Baccalaureate, where there are none. Now due to this visible episode, which appears in the press, perhaps they appear. But , there is no long-term public policy or specific training of what a psychologist has to have to work in an educational center”, he considered.
For the psychologists Perpetue and Balaguer, the approach must take into account how the educational center or institution works which students attend. Balaguer explained that behaviors “are also modeled by the institution. For example, a highly stressed organization will generate more violent groups,” he said.
For her part, Perpetue pointed out that it is necessary to work “issues of coexistence, social skills” and explained that when there are psychologists in high schools, they work on specific situations and “they don’t have enough time to plan how to intervene throughout the year in the promotion and prevention. They’re reactive,” she explained.
In this sense, the Codicen authorities said that educational transformation is necessary to address the problem of violence among students. For Minister Da Silveira, one of the causes of these clashes is education. “When someone feels frustrated, insecure or angry and cannot express it in words, it is usual for them to resort to violence,” he considered. The authorities considered that the educational transformation will also bring a “social and affective transformation,” said Yañez.
Psychologists specialized in education agree that the work with adolescents should be group and not so much individual, as it happens up to now in the Basic Cycle. Perpetue had an experience at the Dámaso Antonio Larrañaga high school, a large high school, which in 2018 had been occupied by students and there had been two suicides. In this context, the specialist came to the center in an extraordinary way. According to him, during his last year at that high school he individually interviewed 140 students among whom problems of anxiety, depression and domestic violence.
However, during his time at the Dámaso high school, he tried to change the concept of the psychologist as a clinician who cares for students in an office and formed two groups to work with games, coexistence dynamics and areas of reflection, something that he considered to have been successful. “In public high schools there is no space or budget for people who dedicate themselves to that,” said Perpetue.
Free hours
On the other hand, the teachers gathered in the phenapes affirmed that there were “many resignations” that are generating free hours at this beginning of classes. The union member Menchaca said to The Observer that “when the students are together for several hours, in the patio or in the classroom, conflicts arise” and denounced that the secondees cannot attend these free moments because they are “overflowed” making registrations and finishing assembling the groups.
However, for the Secondary Education Council the free hours that students have “are normal situations”, as he said deputy director Yanez. The hierarch explained that each year more students enroll in high schools and, therefore, more groups are created, which means that when a new one is created, “you have to wait for them to register for the call, which also lasts a couple of days”, thereforein that period there are groups that have free hours.
