“It is completely unconstitutional what is being done, because it puts into question the right to universal access to education. The determination of the number of places in private institutions to be supported by the State must take into account the population criterion of the municipality where they are located. If this were the case, in Monção we should have 19 supported places for articulated education. But we only have eight, while municipalities with fewer inhabitants have more places,” lamented the president of the Monção Municipality, in the Viana do Castelo district.
António Barbosa (PSD) plans to take the process “to the utmost consequences” and believes “the Government will have to address the issue to ensure territorial cohesion in public access to articulated education”, highlighting that the situation affects “the entire country”.
The Administrative and Fiscal Court of Braga, where both the main action and the precautionary measure were filed, today announced in a national newspaper two notifications for 130 national institutions related to music and the arts to register as interested parties in the proceedings.
Barbosa also pointed out that according to the rules defined by the DGEstE — Direção-Geral dos Estabelecimentos Escolares, if a new school wants to apply for publicly supported places, “it has no right and receives zero supported places, because they did not exist in previous years”.
“A municipality that doesn’t have and wants to have articulated education does not have the possibility to have supported places,” he criticized, denouncing the asymmetries created by “a flawed process”.
In the precautionary measure, the municipality requests “the suspension of the effectiveness” of several points of the opening notice for the DGEstE Sponsorship Contract 2024-2030.
The DGEstE Sponsorship Contract 2024-2023, reviewed by Lusa, stipulates that “if no places have been allocated in any offering in the 2020 and 2022 competitions, the same will happen in the current competition”.
The Monção Municipality also asks that the ministry be “temporarily condemned to create a number of places for specialized artistic education for the cycle beginning in 2025-2026 for the representative institutions of the municipalities provided there, according to the population number of the municipalities that make up each CIM/AM [Intermunicipal Community or Metropolitan Area], where these educational institutions are located, within the approved limit of places for each CIM/AM, which, in the specific case, for the Banda Musical de Monção […], are 19 places”.
“We want measures to be taken now, while the criteria are being reviewed,” explained António Barbosa.
In the main administrative action, the Monção Municipality asks for the “declaration of illegality” of several points of the opening notice for the competition “for the signing of sponsorship contracts […] for the school years 2024/2025 to 2029/2030 of the DGEstE”.
It also requests the annulment “of the final list of places in the competitive procedure for specialized music education, dated 14.10.2024”.
Lusa contacted the Ministry of Education, but no response has been received yet.
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