The Regional Goverment excludes educational reinforcement from subsidies for extracurricular activities

The Generalitat Valenciana, through the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, has decided to exclude the educational reinforcement of subsidies for extracurricular activities as requested by Benidorm City Council after a proposal approved in full last August. In this way, as explained by the mayor of Benidorm, Toni Pérez, "the educational reinforcement program aimed at the school population from 3 to 18 years old will not have regional funding."
Pérez recalled that the plenary session unanimously agreed to urge the Regional Ministry to modify Order 25/2021, of August 1, so that the aid to municipalities for extracurricular activities included “explicitly and as eligible expenditure the direct aid to students who require educational support ”.
The Order of the Regional Govermnet reinforces activities to promote socio-cultural and sports participation, but as the mayor has lamented, “they put the brake on financing extracurricular activities more focused on structured learning, since they have included collaboration in activities like the educational reinforcement classes ”.
Despite not having funding from the Ministry, the mayor has assured that the City Council will continue to give continuity to the program this school year despite the fact that the Ministry “inexplicably has failed to recognize the importance of the initiative. We understand it as a cut within a proposal that the Department should make its own ”. "Bad news for all the students, families and municipalities of the Valencian Community"  added Pérez.
The mayor also recalled that the Department of Education, Youth, Culture and Sports, launched 'Activem els col • les' program that allowed the school population with educational reinforcement needs access extracurricular classes co-financed by the City Council.
“We are going to include the educational reinforcement program charged to municipal resources,” said Pérez, “despite the fact that it is a direct competence of the Generalitat, which has now applied a cut and leaves the municipalities without funding for this, because for them it is not an investment but an expense ”.

This program, focused on students in the second and third cycle of Primary and Secondary schools in public centers, allowed 230 minors in the city to obtain municipal grants for educational reinforcement classes in the first semester of this year.
Thus, each student received 300 euros, at a rate of 50 euros per month, for their reinforcement classes. The City Council allocated 68,100 euros to this call; an initiative that was valued “very positively by families and educational centers.
Municipal aid was directed especially to families in Benidorm with fewer resources and to those whose children required educational support, derived, for example, from not having been able to follow during the past confinement the normal development of the telematic classes offered by the centers to the public. lack of technological means. "Without this financial support, part of these students would not have been able to access this educational reinforcement and, therefore, would not have achieved the academic objectives," explained Toni Pérez, who has once again insisted on the administration's "lack of sensitivity" autonomic in educational matters.