education

School can be dangerous

The government never finished building the school it promised. It’s now is a safety hazard.

EDUARDO ESPINOSA/LA PRENSA

left behind: Accidents caused by abandoned building materials are constant at the Cerro Cruz school in the Comarca Ngöbe Buglé.1016161

Neglecting to maintain existing school buildings and endangering the health and safety of students, isn't the government's only failure when it comes to the nation's educational facilities.

Take, for example, the Cerro Cruz school in the Comarca Ngöbe Buglé. There in a province populated mainly by poor indigenous people, two years have passed since the state abandoned the construction of a new education center, leaving behind materials that, reportedly, have caused several accidents.

A teacher at the school, Omayra Rodríguez, said that two students were recently injured at the site. One sixth-grade girl fractured her arm. Another girl in the fifth grade broke her wrist. "This isn't the first time this has happened," Rodríguez said. "Other children have had accidents, too."

The school was supposed to have two classrooms, a kitchen, eating area, bathroom, bathing area for nursery school children, and a zinc roof. Unfinished walls, foundations and exposed metal stand in their place today. The safe and serviceable school the government pledged to build has yet to materialize.

Rodríguez said she has repeatedly complained about the situation to the Ministerio de Educación (Meduca) and that other teachers as well as parents have appealed to the Contraloría General de la República for help. So far nothing has changed.

Orlando Camarena, president of the Consejo Anticorrupción in the Comarca, said he is worried about the Ministerio de Educación's "apathy" toward the building, whose funding, he said, was provided by the United States.

On Sept. 12, 2007, Meduca sent a report to the Contraloría General de la República saying that they were working on the building and that the school would be finished in 90 days. The Contraloría reported that the project was recently inspected by staff of the Dirección de Ingeniería y Fiscalización, but it gave no other details about the status of the project. The school, meanwhile, remains a hazardous place to get an education.