"The boys and girls will have to be brought with three pairs of socks and two coats this winter because the air conditioning system (hot/cold) at the Gloria Fuertes nursery school, located in the Las Tablas neighborhood, north of the capital, It has been broken since July," complains one of the parents, who prefers to remain anonymous, while demanding better salaries for the educators of this type of centers, who during these weeks are supporting strike days in protest of the low salaries. .
In this municipal educational center, whose responsibility for the maintenance of the building corresponds to the Fuencarral El Pardo Board of the Madrid City Council, the cooling system has been bad since 2018, when it opened. The problem now is that it had never been inoperative for four months. Yesterday, the management team was forced to notify families of the situation.
Mother Carolina Díaz González, who has her son in the space of 1-2 years, remembers that there have always been problems in this regard: "I had another son here when school started, five years ago, and we had to bring blankets so they wouldn't freeze." At first, families even brought umbrellas because there were no awnings in the patios.
The councilor responsible for the area is José Antonio Martínez Páramo of the PP, who when the school year started last September, passed by the center and saw first-hand that they always put rugs at the entrance so that the children and children do not get their feet wet. their families because the system leaks.
Laura López, another of the mothers who takes her daughter to said school, highlights that "last year we ended up without air conditioning." And she adds: "It was foreseeable that we were going to be without heating and the problem is that they don't fix it until the cold arrives."
The solution of the City Council led by José Luis Martínez-Almeida has been to send 16 heating devices and the plan is to send some more, as a patch, until we see if the problem with the cooling system can be solved.
156 children from the neighborhood are enrolled in this educational center, plus the educators, who total 28. In the opinion of Father Javier Pereira Nieto, "with this cold the children cannot continue like this." In his opinion, "now we can keep them warmer, but in July they couldn't cope with 27 degrees in the classrooms, although the educators had them almost only in diapers."
For some residents of the neighborhood, this is another example of neglect on the part of the City Council for the population stage of 1 to 3 years. Laura López insists that "the playgrounds are very degraded in Las Tablas, when in nearby municipalities such as San Sebastián de los Reyes or Alcobendas, which are very close, there are magnificent parks." "This is further proof that the Madrid City Council does not care about the stage of life of our children when they are very young," she says.
