The president of the Episcopal Conference, Juan José Omella, has left Catholic schools out of place after yesterday proposing to the Government the school check as a solution to improve the financing of subsidized schools, where 25% of the students are enrolled. This system, which consists of the State giving parents an amount of money or a redeemable bond to pay the expenses of the educational center where they want to enroll their children, is only defended by Vox and private schools. But in the concerted one they have been warning for years of the problems that its implementation would generate.
During the inaugural conference of the Plenary Assembly of bishops, Omella denounced that "the current educational model does not adequately ensure the freedom of families and the neutrality of the State" included in the Constitution. In addition, he said that the concerted school is "always at risk of being cut or suffering arbitrariness by the public powers" and hinted that the State is "discriminating" against Christian students. That is why he called for "a free educational system, regardless of the private or public ownership of the center, which respects the freedom of parents to educate their children."
And, to achieve this, he offered a solution: "Couldn't the school check be the true neutrality and freedom that we ask of the competent Administration?", he asked himself rhetorically.
This is the first time that Omella has proposed this formula in a Plenary Assembly. In the sector they do not understand that he did it and did not claim, in line with the majority feeling, the update of the amount of the concert module; that is, the money that the State gives for each classroom in compulsory education. The concerted centers have spent years denouncing a situation of "economic suffocation" due to the "lack of financing": the administration pays around 50%-60% of the real cost of the classroom and the rest have to be provided by the owners of the schools. This forces them to charge monthly fees - they are supposed to be voluntary, but if no one paid them, the centers would have to close - and to come up with all kinds of complementary services and activities to raise funds.
The employers' association Escuelas Católicas, which represents nearly 2,000 concerted centers, considers it "reasonable" that Omella has raised "the need for fair and balanced financing of educational centers." But he insists that the check "poses serious drawbacks." Because?
“It is not the solution for our system because it does not guarantee free basic education, it does not improve cohesion and it does not produce equity in the system”, answers Pedro Huerta, general secretary of Catholic Schools. For the concerted one, the school check is a "more unstable" tool and with "more legal uncertainty" than the concert. The concerts have a minimum duration of six years in Primary (10, in the case of Madrid) and are protected by state law and by extensive jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. In exchange, the check is subject to the budgetary availability of the moment and to the political derivatives of the autonomous governments on duty. That is, they can be put on and taken off or enlarged and reduced depending on the circumstances. And it doesn't cover all expenses, which can cause tuition prices to rise.
"There is no need to do experiments with formulas that do not work," says Huerta, who recalls that in regions of Italy and the US where the school check has been implemented "they have had to back down."
"This measure that is now put on the table as one more option to assess should not distance us from the real problem that is the lack of funding for our centers and the need to find the best solution to it," they insist in Catholic Schools, where there is a stir because of Omella's words.
The bishops have spent the entire legislature keeping a low profile on educational issues despite the fact that they were harmed by the changes of the Government, for example, regarding the reduction of the weight of the subject of Religion, the prohibition of subsidizing education that separates by sex or the obstacles to the concerted one. But yesterday Omella was very harsh against the PSOE-Unidas Podemos coalition for how its laws have encouraged, he implied, "gender ideologies" in the classroom.
Two days after feminists warned that schools are forced to denounce parents who make it difficult for their children to change their sex, Omella warned of "ideological substitutes programmed with other interests" and called for "an educational proposal that promotes a affective-sexual education freed from gender ideologies and a path of learning in the healthy integration of instincts»
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