Schools in SP must contact the Tutelary Council for absences – 09/06/2023 – Education

After becoming the target of yet another investigation by the Public Ministry, the Tarcísio de Freitas government (Republicans) published this Wednesday (6) the procedures that state schools must adopt before canceling the enrollment of students who miss classes without justification. .

The resolution published in the Official Gazette determines that schools must start searching for students after three days of consecutive absences. If the student does not return or those responsible do not provide justification for the absence, the unit must contact the Tutelary Council when the absences reach 10% of the school days —that is, 20 days.

The guidelines published this Wednesday follow what determines the LDB (Law of Guidelines and Bases of National Education), but were not included in the previous resolution published by the Tarcísio administration in July this year.

The previous publication only defined that schools should cancel the enrollment of students who registered absences for 15 consecutive days without justification. The text said that the units should present “documents proving the active search actions” for the dismissal, without defining the actions and when it could be considered that they have been exhausted.

In the resolution, which was in effect for two months, there was no mention that schools should activate the Tutelary Council.

For experts in the field, the previous resolution violated the basic right to education, guaranteed by the Constitution and the LDB (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases), in addition to leaving students in vulnerable situations even more helpless.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office also opened an investigation considering that the measure characterized a “possible violation of the constitutional right to stay in school”. According to the LDB, a student cannot be approved if he/she presents a number of absences greater than 25% of the class hours taught in the school year, but the number of absences cannot impact the right to remain in school.

three investigations

In the month of August alone, the Public Prosecutor’s Office decided to open three investigations to investigate decisions made by the state secretary of Education, Renato Feder.

The first of these, on August 3, was to investigate the secretary’s decision to give up teaching material from the PNLD (National Textbook Program). Measure from which the government of São Paulo later retreated.

On August 5, the Public Prosecutor’s Office also opened an investigation to investigate a possible conflict of interest of Feder for overseeing the secretariat’s contracts with the company in which he is a shareholder, Multilaser.