“Seeing myself as a gypsy, I didn’t feel so capable”. This testimony, which can irritate anyone, is common among Gypsy students, who suffer discrimination in the classroom and lack of support in the family environment, in most cases. The school life of Gypsy boys and girls begins later and ends earlier, lasting an average of 12 years. Two out of three gypsy girls and boys do not finish Compulsory Secondary Education (THAT) and the school dropout rises to 86%when in the population as a whole it stands at 13%. For this reason, the Secretariado Gitano Foundation (FSG) calls for a specific educational guidance and reinforcement plan to tackle these “indecent” data.
In an event organized at the Fundación Telefónica Space in Madrid, the general director of the Secretariado Gitano Foundation, Sara Giménez, denounced that “our system is failing because 63% of Gypsy students do not finish ESO compared to 4% of society. in general, and because 83% of Roma students have dropped out of education. When the situation is broken down, we see a late incorporation into early childhood education, high repetition rates, or how children and Gypsy girls, at a certain point, are not part of the educational system. We can be enrolled in school and not be part of the educational systemand that is where we have the great challenge pending.” With these words he presented a new awareness campaign that, under the motto ‘Not Going Back to School‘, tries to denounce the educational inequalities that “weigh down the future of Roma children and youth.”
Giménez has considered these figures “indecent” and, to reverse them, he has demanded that public administrations implement a specific school guidance and reinforcement plan similar to the Aulas Promociona program which the FSG has been carrying out since 2009 at its headquarters throughout Spain and with which it reaches around 1,600 students a year. “It is a model that works and we have proof: 80% of the students who receive this support outside the classroom finish secondary school and, of them, 90% continue with higher education,” he adds. 20 minutes.
The Aula Promociona program consists of reinforcement activities with Roma students outside of school hours at the headquarters of the Secretariado Gitano Foundation. Individual tutoring, attention to families, support classrooms and orientation reinforcement are some of the sessions carried out. Manuel Vargas GarcÃa, 36 years old, is an educational counselor for the FSG in Cuenca. According to your experience, The main barrier for families is their “low qualifications”many of them without mandatory studies. For this reason, “there comes a time when they cannot help their children with their homework or check whether they have done well on their exams. Furthermore, they are generally families with low economic resources, therefore they cannot afford private reinforcement classes.”
That was the case of Naomi Vaca Saavedra, one of her students for years who this year began her International Studies degree at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. It hasn’t been an easy road. “My main difficulties were lack of motivation and the fact of not having references.other gypsy companions. “I felt a little disoriented,” she confesses to this newspaper. But she did not give up and it was precisely the desire to become a reference for other gypsy students that helped her continue. At 21 years old, she is the first in her family to reach the university. “I already have prejudices gone, now I am a girl who is quite sure of myself”says.
In addition to the lack of family support, Gypsy students also have to face teachers who are unaware of their reality and who make “many comments that seem like they don’t but that do make sense, that fill up that little backpack that we have, people wave around.” throughout our lives,” continues educator Manuel Vargas, while asking them to “become aware of the cause, don’t have low expectations with boys and girls, do not say that ‘they are going to turn 16 and we already know what is going to happen’ or that ‘let’s see if we can get it to end because we already know what they are like’. All these types of comments that are made in educational centers. We need more awareness and less prejudice,” he emphasizes.
The Borja López family
Azucena López and Antonio Borja are parents of four children between 27 and 10 years old. The oldest works as a computer programmer in an international consulting firm. Her mother says that when she entered the company, her colleagues asked her “if she was Arab or Latin American, everything except thinking that she was a gypsy, Spanish, from Madrid.” In conversation with 20 minutes They explain that always They have had to “prove what others take for granted”. They are almost an exception, as they have always supported their children in their studies, not only so that they would have more options to obtain better working conditions, but also “for personal enrichment,” says the father.
Borja, who left school as a child after suffering, according to what he says, an episode of racism and prejudice from a teacher who suspected him after school supplies disappeared from the classroom, denounces that “There are many schools that are clearly segregated”. In his opinion, the high school failure among Roma students is due to several factors, including a lack of references and family support, but also “misinformation”: “There are many Roma parents who find that the school year ends and no one has informed them that they should have booked a place for an institute.
This street vendor remembers a discriminatory situation he experienced when his son finished school. “We went there to the party, they made the video where they finished everyone off and they didn’t show my son in the video, nor did they give him the diploma… these are things that… they didn’t tell us about the meetings either,” he reproaches.
The feeling that this family has is that the gypsy students “lThey pass you grade to get rid of them as soon as possible at school and then they arrive at school without the appropriate level“Once at the institute, they continue, they put them in separate adaptation classrooms “to draw, so they don’t get in the way” from the first to the third year of ESO and in the fourth they put them back with everyone “because they have to graduate”, but That’s where the crash comes.
In this sense, Luis Garrote, who is also a social worker at Aulas Promociona, denounces that Roma students often suffer from “curriculum mismatch” by “teachers with little vocation.” For example, he meets students “who are in fifth and sixth grade and are working on involved addition and subtraction, which occurs in the first years of Primary.” This makes children feel “unmotivated” and “condemns them to academic failure in the future.” “They don’t have anyone within the system who believes in them”he laments.
The general director of the Secretariado Gitano Foundation, Sara Giménez, has demanded “full citizenship”, something that “we cannot have if the main social elevator that allows progress, which is education, is broken with us.”