2023-06-27 07:01:00
Hunger and fear took the boy Carlos AM out of school: hunger, because the money his mother earns cleaning houses in Medellín is not enough to give him the food a minor needs at 11 years of age; and fear, because the boys of the combo that runs his neighborhood in the upper part of Comuna 4 (Aranjuez), have installed themselves at the school gate in recent days to see “who serves them and who does not”, to run errands, as reported by the child’s mother.
Without a quiet life while cleaning the houses in the Laureles neighborhood and without being able to care for her son, Sonia, Carlos AM’s mother, thought that the best way to prevent her son from ending up in the neighborhood combo would be to leave him locked up at home, accompanied of his 8-year-old cousin, and an 89-year-old grandmother whose hands already feel heavy to help around the house.
“I prefer that he stay at home, I prefer that he be locked up all day than that he end up in a corner,” says Sonia, who has already gone through the pain of losing a son who did not want to study and got into the entanglements of a urban warfare that took his life when he was barely 15 years old.
Without knowing it, with this action Sonia helped to increase school dropout rates in Colombia in the last year, which is why the Attorney General’s Office issued an alert to the number of young people in the country who have abandoned the classroom.
As revealed by the control entity, only in the last year 341,417 minors stopped attending schools and colleges for reasons that still need to be specified.
“Given the worrying numbers of school dropouts in the country, the Attorney General’s Office asked the Minister of Education, Aura Vergara Figueroa, to formulate urgent actions to guarantee the permanence of boys, girls, adolescents and young people in the educational system.
Actions in three fields
In order to clarify the causes of the high dropout rate by students, the Attorney General’s Office requested three direct actions from the Ministry of Education: the first, to formulate urgent actions to guarantee the permanence of children, adolescents and young people in the educational system.
The second, a detailed report clarifying “the specific actions defined by the Government to accompany those ETCs in which the highest levels of abandonment occur, detailing the main causes identified and the actions to counteract them.”
And –thirdly– the Attorney General’s Office asked the Minister for the current status of the Information System for the Monitoring, Prevention and Analysis of School Dropouts (SIMPADE), a system in which the information of the student, his family nucleus is registered , of the institutional and municipal context “in order to be analyzed by the different levels of administration of the educational system to make decisions that improve school retention.”
The Attorney General’s request comes three days after Minister Figueroa announced the approval of $2.2 billion in the budget addition to strengthen the school feeding plan, increase coverage and educational infrastructure in the country, reaching $57 billion in budget.
They inject money into the education sector
The Ministry of Education will also allocate resources to finance payroll expenses for teacher pensioners and to increase the coverage of the School Food Program (PAE), ensuring that its execution coincides with the end of the school calendar for children from the Territorial Entities. Certified that have greater budgetary restrictions. “Additional resources for higher education will be essential to advance the goal established in the National Development Plan that seeks to provide access opportunities to 500,000 new students from all regions of the country,” said Vergara.
#children #left #studies #year