The Minister of Education, João Costa, assumed this Tuesday that, at the initiative of his ministry, 7,500 medical boards are being granted to monitor “some low standards” of teachers, although he defends that, in principle, they are all honest.
“The medical boards are in the contracting phase, adjudication, it was an initiative of the Ministry of Education, hiring 7,500 medical boards to precisely monitor some patterns of casualties that are not as regular as they seem,” João Costa told journalists at the end of the inauguration of the remodeling works of the kindergarten of Santa Cruz da Trapa, municipality of São Pedro do Sul, Viseu, which underwent interventions worth more than 200 thousand euros.
The minister recalled that the dismissals of teachers are “a pattern that has occurred in other years” and resorted to the last school year (2021/22) to affirm that “87% of the requests for replacement of teachers were due to sick leave” , referring to the fact that there are “some relatively irregular patterns, also in terms of the incidence of some specific periods of the year”. “I assume, in principle, that everyone is honest, but it is important to use these surveillance instruments,” she stressed.
The opening ceremony took place to the sound of “Grândola Vila Morena”, by Zeca Afonso, echoed by the National Federation of Teachers (Fenprof) of Viseu to welcome the minister, while the teachers carried banners demanding the “end of quotas” and demanding “appropriate hours”.
“It was a happy coincidence that we unveiled the plaque to the sound of “Grândola Vila Morena”, I really liked it, because in fact every time we inaugurate a space like this we are affirming our construction and our consolidation as a democracy”, said the minister.
In a speech dedicated to the “importance of preschool education”, he recalled that, before April 25, 1974, Portugal “had a percentage of less than 5% of children attending preschool education” and “in the network population then there was absolutely nothing.”
“This commitment to requalification, this commitment to preschool education, is actually a commitment to the principles of our democracy, so the music worked well, it was very appropriate, and also because it reminds us that it is one of the great achievements of our democracy, the importance of local power”, he defended.
The minister highlighted the “importance of local authorities in making possible the requalification of more than 500 schools in recent years,” adding that “more than 300” will be built in the coming years.
João Costa told reporters that the process of transferring funds to school groups “is advanced, it is being processed so that the schools can receive the remaining balances.”
“The State Budget was approved late and that caused, this year, several procedures that, in a normal year of operation of all the machinery of the ministry, had produced a gap in a State budget that only came into force in July . Today we are dealing with this situation as planned,” he concluded.
Source: Observadora
