Since October, some eighty pupils from Alicante have been eating their lunch every day next to the wall bars where they should be performing physical education. Since then, the walls and ceilings of the Mora Puchol School canteen in the Babel neighbourhood have been damp, and the paint has been peeling. Because of this, the school management had to set up a makeshift dining room in the gymnasium. Because of this, the gym can no longer be used for anything else.
The school community is once again fed up with the City Council’s delay, which is in charge of keeping the school’s infrastructure up to date. It started to be a problem once it rained in the autumn. According to the school, the gutters on the roof of the building where the impacted cafeteria is located were full of pine debris. This caused the water to pile up until it leaked into the facility. After that, mould took over the places where the primary school kids went.
Sources at the school say that since then, the school administration has addressed many letters to the City Council, both the Department of Education and the Department of Infrastructure, but has not heard back.
Because of this delay, the school hasn’t been able to offer badminton, one of its most popular activities for pupils, for the whole school year, and the school games haven’t started yet. The tables and chairs that are used every day for lunch in the gym can’t be moved, which has also stopped the organisation of theatre workshops and, in the end, the use of the gym as an auditorium.
The long wait to fix this problem is even more frustrating because the school has additional maintenance issues, like malfunctioning toilets, blinds, and blackboards.
Repeated complaints
Other schools and parent-teacher associations in Alicante have also filed complaints in the last few weeks. One of them is from the Azorín school, whose primary school building has been closed off for 42 days because debris from the cornice has been falling, and its outer fence is also at risk of falling.
People have also complained about the adult education centre in the Tómbola neighbourhood, which has had trash from the old barracks outside since December. The San Blas school also had a broken water line last week, which left the school without water for two days and caused a lot of trouble. The City Council started fixing the problem within 24 hours of finding out about it. The school also has a broken lift that hasn’t worked all year, toilets that don’t work and a water leak in the preschool facility.
Author: Derek Appleton
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