Angel Valdes | March 21, 2023
Engineer Linda Pardo from the National Maintenance Directorate of the Ministry of Education (MEDUCA) spoke about how school work is maintained in 2023 and on the subject that although there are schools that have come out to protest, they are the same schools that have not been able to use the Fund for Equity and Quality of Education (FECE) for the purchase of supplies or furniture.
Pardo explained that there are currently 32 schools that have class suspension issues or teach classes in modules, which represents 1% of all educational centers nationwide.
Regarding the protests that have taken place specifically in schools in West Panama and North Panama, Pardo explained that in the case of Francisco Beckman he has 455,000 dollars from FECE that could help them resolve situations specific to the school, but the reports are three months old. life and the directors do not execute them, because they must be programmed to be able to use them, it is part of the responsibility of the director of the educational center.
Regarding whether the school directors do not know how to use the FECE to be able to cover the needs of the Pardo school, he explained “Francisco de Miranda has over 500 thousand dollars of FECE, as does the Rubiano Institute, Pedro Pablo Sánchez, Estella Sierra , there are a lot of educational centers, La Siesta also reports 342 thousand dollars in its FECE, so it is a matter of working on a schedule to have all the repairs that are requested on time, because evaluations are often requested, the team goes, does the survey , performs the report, delivers it, and the report is never executed.”
Asked if there is a way that MEDUCA can teach school directors how to use FECE effectively, Pardo explained that there are ways to explain how to execute it effectively «Each regional has a shopping table on site so that all Centers that had this type of situation of not knowing how, they needed support, they could approach this purchasing table in each regional and additional seeing that it has cost them a bit, we are going to stay all year serving the different regions to that this situation does not repeat itself for the next start of classes.
