The Getafe neighborhood of 15,000 inhabitants that cannot be explained why it still does not have an institute

Getafe City Council and Community of Madrid discussing and the institute without building. That is what has happened for years in Los Molinos, the neighborhood of this city south of the capital that demands a school for secondary and high school.. With nearly 15,000 inhabitants, more than 400 young people must travel daily to other neighborhoods to be able to go to class.

Although the regional government rejected in September the plot that the City Council had given it for the construction of the institute in 2019, the City Council itself has already started the procedures to try a new location.. They demand that they accept the proposal and that the study center be built in three years.

Such is the struggle that has been going on in the neighborhood for years, that hundreds of people join the IES Los Molinos NOW Platform! Javier Torres is its spokesperson: “We are in a relatively young neighborhood, but it should already have an institute. The first homes are around 15 years old,” he begins his diatribe. The location of the neighborhood doesn't help much either.. Somewhat away from the heart of the city, on one side, they are surrounded by the Andalusia highway and on the other by the M-45.. “Communications have to be by car,” says this neighbor.

In any case, the Administration should have prevented what would happen years after the first home purchase. “The neighborhood was created through a consortium between the City Council and the Community as protected housing for young people, so they knew what would happen,” adds Torres.. Thus, the only school in Los Molinos is a school, and it does not cover the real demand of the neighborhood, according to what is explained by the Platform. But its construction was not easy either: “It took seven years to build it and now it is growing along lower lines,” says the spokesperson..

A “monster”

This school has four lines, that is, four classes per course. “We see a shortage of classrooms in the upper grades and, when the children finish Primary, they have to abandon it, because there is no institute in the neighborhood,” explains Torres himself.. Hence his particular claim, especially to leave behind the “monster”, as he calls it, that the regional Executive created with the school, to which part of the Secondary School has been added.. It is a provisional CEIPSO.

“Next year there will be no classrooms available. They have created this CEIPSO to save time and not build a proper institute, which is what we need, a center independent of the school,” explains this affected father.. The problem they face goes somewhat further, since the secondary education centers near Los Molinos are also saturated, some of them with up to 11 classes per year..

The struggle of hundreds of affected families has not begun in 2023. For at least six years, the school's AMPA works commission has held cyclical meetings with the Madrid Department of Education, and in all meetings they have received the institute's request. Things began to change, or so they thought, when in 2019 the Getafe City Council gave a plot of land to the Community. According to Torres, “what they had to do was receive her, admit her and start the process, but they had four years to do that, otherwise they would have to restart it.”.

New process

The Community of Madrid did not accept the transfer of the Getafense Town Hall, so there has been no progress in the last four years. The Ministry of Education, for its part, considers that “the plot initially offered by the City Council, located next to an industrial estate, was not the most suitable for locating an educational center.”. On the other hand, they prefer not to comment on why it took so long to deny the enclave.

Likewise, they report that at the end of September they accepted the proposal for the new plot that Getafe offered them.. “In this case it does meet the requirements of proximity to educational demand, urban planning, connection with the public network, transport, green areas, other facilities and with the consolidated residential urban planning that are appropriate for a better provision of the educational service. “adds the Ministry. They assure that they are waiting for the City Council to complete the transfer procedures to immediately put out to tender the drafting of the project for the new center.

Three years

The City Council, for its part, maintains that “it was not until September 2023, and at the insistence of the mayor, educational community and families, when the Community of Madrid decided that the transferred plot was not of its preference.”. In this way, the City Council once again offered four other plots in Los Molinos. The Ministry elected and the local Government Board approved it. “The Community once again has a public plot to build the IES, so Getafe requires the same speed for its acceptance, since the previous plot was not even received for four years,” they reiterate in a statement..

In any case, the City Council has transferred the plot only for three years “to avoid fraudulent use of public space by the regional government”. That is the time that the Government chaired by Isabel Díaz Ayuso has to build the long-awaited institute in Los Molinos, which would cover 15,000 families..

Constant works

Torres, for his part, remembers that in the last regional budgets there was already an allocation of 500,000 euros aimed at starting the construction of the institute. “With that money you don't build anything, it's just the drafting of the project, but they included it in the budgets to then throw back the first plot transferred,” says Torres in reference to the regional government, who calls the operation a “smokescreen.”.

The spokesperson himself has two affected children. One in Primary, who goes to school more normally than the second, who is already in Secondary: “Imagine, the oldest has spent his entire school life with construction, lack of classrooms and teachers and without having facilities that are legislated by the Community of Madrid as indispensable, such as a laboratory”, explains Torres.

For the moment, the IES Los Molinos NOW! Platform will continue working so that its young people are not considered “second-class students”, according to the group. “We want the Community of Madrid to have the real will to build the institute and not delay the procedures, as it has done until now. “Here there are children who go to a construction site, not to a school,” concludes Torres himself.