Leader of Ubes: ‘Full-time school is no use with work’ – 02/01/2023 – Education

“It’s no use making all Brazilian schools full-time if the majority of students have to work; dropouts are only going to grow”, says Jade Beatriz, 21, president of Ubes (Brazilian Union of Secondary Students).

Black, daughter of a housemaid and a fruit seller, she says that the reform of secondary education “may seem ideal, with new, creative subjects and laboratory classes, but it doesn’t work in a country with so many schools without bathrooms, lunches and teachers. ores”.

Raised on the outskirts of Fortaleza, Jade participated in meetings of the education group of the transition team and was inaugurated by Camilo Santana (PT), who governed the state for eight years (2014-2022), as Lula’s Minister of Education.

She says she recognizes advances in Ceará education, “although there are many structural problems in schools”. She was happy with the former governor’s choice for the MEC, but claims that she will continue fulfilling her “role, which is to take the students’ demands and demand”.

“Despite this being a progressive government, which is open to dialogue, if necessary, the student movement will mobilize, take to the streets.”

Jade says that Ubes has already met with Izolda Cela, chosen as executive secretary, “the number 2” of the MEC. Elected vice-governor of Ceará, Izolda took over the government last year, when Camilo ran for the Senate. An educator, she had already been Secretary of Education in Ceará, after having held the same position in Sobral, which is among the municipalities with the best results in education in the country.

“Among the topics of the meeting with Izolda, we talked about high school dropout rates and the Enem, which last year had the lowest number of enrollments in history”, he says.

Ubes’ proposal to help combat dropouts is that high school students, especially those from full-time schools, receive a scholarship, in addition to a free pass for transportation. The scholarship for high school students was debated by Lula’s transition team.

Jade experienced the dilemma between studying and having to work. In 2022, she graduated in logistics at the Dona Creusa do Carmo Rocha State School of Professional Education. “I had a good education, but it was hard not being able to work through high school,” she says. “Support would be needed throughout the course. As there is none, many have to drop out of school to work.”

Ceará is the state with the highest rate of full-time enrollment in the country in primary education, with 33.2%, and with the third highest in secondary education, with 38% —as a basis for comparison, São Paulo has, respectively, 12.2% and 18.8%. Encouraging this extended workload model was one of the hallmarks of the Camilo Santana government, which intends to expand it nationally now ahead of the MEC.

For Jade, the full-time secondary education she attended was of quality “by associating the common curriculum with vocational education and citizenship education”.

His political engagement began in the pandemic. It was in 2020 that she entered Ubes and joined the PC do B, the party for which she ran for councilwoman. With 310 votes, she was not elected. She achieved her best result in the election for the presidency of Ubes, at the 2022 congress, in which she was chosen by more than 80% of the approximately 6,000 students present at the Mané Garrincha stadium, in Brasília.

Who watched Jade’s victory with emotion was her mother, who is 40 years old and decided to accompany her to the event. “She was worried about the student movement,” she says. “We stayed in a tent for the four days of the congress, my mother went with me to the debates”, she says. “I thought it would just be a mess, but she saw us talking about a lot of serious and difficult things, she said to me: ‘Oh, that’s it? So it’s ok'”, she recalls, laughing.

When she was a baby, Jade went with her mother to work and stayed in the maid’s room. At 4, she was enrolled in a municipal school, where she stayed from kindergarten to 5th grade. From the 6th to the 9th, she studied at a private school in the neighborhood, which her parents paid for with sacrifice, worried about the lack of quality of the state school and the violence in its surroundings. “They also wanted me to learn better so that I could later get a place in the state’s technical high school, which has a selection test,” she says. “The technical school, for people from peripheral regions, is an opportunity.”

Jade now lives in São Paulo, in a house she shares with other Ubes directors, in Vila Mariana (south zone). She has an allowance from the entity and takes a pre-university course to try for a place in law at USP.

Until February, she is in Rio to prepare the Ubes seminar, in which a document will be discussed with demands to be forwarded to the MEC, among them the readjustment of the value of school lunches and the universalization of internet access in schools. The entity should also reinforce opposition to the new high school.

“This reform was carried out by people who don’t know what a public school is”, says Jade. “Of course the school is not attractive and it needs to be renovated, but not this one.” The new high school, she says, has no connection with the reality of public schools in the country.

“How are you going to have a robotics class if there aren’t even bathrooms at school?”