Almost a month after the beginning of the Early Childhood and Primary Education school year in Madrid, more than a thousand students from single-parent families still do not have meal scholarships, although the Madrid Department of Education wanted to send a "reassuring" message by limiting the problem to a "error" in the notification system that they hope to resolve in the coming days. So the advisor of the branch himself, Emilio Viciana, has guaranteed that "no family that meets the requirements will be left without a dining scholarship."
On May 29, the Community of Madrid published the amount of credits available for the granting of school lunch scholarships during this academic year, and set a period for families to submit applications (from June 8 to July 7). ) and established a maximum period of five months for the resolution of the scholarships. However, single-parent families have seen their applications rejected one after another for not providing the details of the second parent.
Following the complaints made by the Association of Single Mothers by Choice (AMSPE), who has come to describe the problem as "humiliating", Viciana explained that everything is due to the incidents arising from the change in the scholarship processing system to comply with the guidelines of the General Intervention. "I think it is very important to point out here that this system is the same one used in all the scholarships launched by the Department of Education of the Community of Madrid and that have been operating for years. Problems have only occurred in this area of dining scholarships and it has precisely been due to the transition from the reduced price system to the scholarship system itself," explained the counselor one day before the deadline for families to correct these formal defects in their requests.
For all these reasons, sources from the ministry fundamentally reject that "single mothers are outside the scholarship system. The problem has come from the massive sending of messages that have been sent in corrections to requests where only one parent appeared and that they have also received single-parent families. To which they add that "a single-parent family does not need to deliver a divorce decree or any other document other than the family book or the Civil Registry certificate in which they appear as the only parent."
In this sense, Emilio Viciana has highlighted that the families have been informed "in a personalized way" and in addition, SMS has been sent to all of them indicating the reason for rectification in their case and what documentation they have to provide. "We understand that in many cases perhaps the sending of messages has been a bit exaggerated, but in any case our intention was to maintain a continuous information channel to ensure that they had all the means to correct it appropriately," he said.
While waiting for the error to be corrected, Viciana recalled that the Community of Madrid will assume the cost of the dining scholarship while these procedures are resolved and has assured that those families that can prove the attempt to correct it and the corresponding documentation will have access to the dining room scholarship even if it has not been resolved within the deadline.
