The Government closes files with the plan to send a mosso to schools and says more centers want to join it

BarcelonaThe Government closes ranks and defends the pilot plan that contemplates integrating a police officer into 14 educational centers in Catalonia for prevention tasks and to improve coexistence. This Tuesday the Department of Education presented the pilot plan for school coexistence in the area of prevention and mediation and gave some details of this trial. Although the department has asked for calm and assured that "the plan has just begun and that time is needed to build the task of the agent [of the Mossos d'Esquadra] in the centers", it has been firm in clarifying the situation that has motivated this plan: "It does not respond to an emergency but rather it is a structural and support preventive need", they explained from the ministry led by Esther Niubó.

In this way, the Government has insisted that different types of schools and institutes have been chosen to carry out the trial. "We have not chosen the centers because they are problematic", they assured. In fact, they also explained that there are already more educational centers that have asked to join this project, but that for the moment it cannot be expanded. Furthermore, Niubó also detailed that "in no case has the plan been imposed on any center" and that, after the controversy of recent days, "no school administration has wanted to abandon the pilot plan". In this regard, the minister also stressed that the task of the Mossos agent will be subordinate to the pedagogical leadership of the school and institute administrations.

Regarding the timeline of this plan, the department explained that this very week an agent has already been integrated into some of the chosen centers, as is the case of an institute in El Prat de Llobregat. Once the trial has begun, the Government plans to carry out a first assessment of its functioning this July and is working with the forecast of carrying out a more extensive assessment at the end of the year. "In January we will see how it has gone and whether it is advisable for this plan to be scaled up to more centers or not", they detailed from Education.

Preventive dynamics

Regarding the objective —Niubó has admitted that the plan is still in an embryonic phase— the plan seeks to promote a preventive and collaborative model of coexistence in educational centers through Mossos' coexistence agents who will be "references in prevention and mediation in the centers". In this regard, the ministry has explained that what they want to do is "move from a reactive scenario" —where the center calls the Mossos if there is a problem— to a preventive dynamic "to act before conflicts erupt or escalate". "It is not a punitive or surveillance model", insisted the head of Education.

Despite arguing that the origin of the pilot test responds "to the demand of the managements of some educational centers", Niubó wanted to insist on saying that "in Catalonia we do not have a problem of coexistence or security in educational centers, but there is a social complexity that ends up impacting the centers".

Regarding the agents who will work in educational centers, Niubó explained that they are Mossos who already had a relationship with schools and institutes and reiterated that "the agents will not go in uniform or with a weapon" and will not enter classrooms or be part of the teaching staff of the centers.