Placed away from home, Portuguese teachers have had three weeks to change their lives, many will be forced to leave their families and say that with such low wages and such high incomes they will have to “pay to be able to work”.
This year the Ministry of Education were able to release the teacher placement lists earlier than usual. “It was on a Friday the 13th August,” recalls Lurdes Mendes, 59, who discovered two weeks ago that in September he starts teaching at a school more than 300 kilometers from his home.
The Philosophy teacher will exchange Porto for a rented apartment in Odivelas. His son is 26, so now these changes are easier, but there are “many colleagues going through complicated situations”.
This is the case of Maria Silva, 40 years old. With two daughters aged 4 and 7 years old, she learned in mid-August that on September 1st, she would have to teach at the new school in Lisbon, 350 kilometers from her home.
“Suddenly, life takes an unexpected turn”, the teacher tells Lusa, criticising the ministry for announcing the placements in August “as if it were a great achievement”.
“It takes more than three weeks to find a house, a kindergarten and a 1st cycle school, at a time when the vacancies in the public are already filled. Maybe we just found a place in a private room”, the mother vents, saying that she is still considering the possibility of the eldest daughter staying with her father.
After 15 years on contracts, Maria Silva followed the advice of colleagues and tried to join the Ministry of Education. She was placed in the Lisbon area (QZP-7) with a salary of around 1,200 Euros. Now she does the maths: in addition to the mortgageon her house in Porto, she will be responsible for the rent on a house in Lisbon. The bills for water and electricity will double and there is still weekend travel to be added.
“We should at least be entitled to allowances, similar to deputies and judges. We can't live off of fresh air”, she criticises.
In addition to the stress of having 19 days to reorganise, Maria Silva feels very responsible for “uprooting the lives of the whole family”.
“When we told the girls that we were going to Lisbon and their father was staying in Porto, they started to cry. It's terrible having to separate children from their father, the rest of the family and their friends. Looks like we're criminals. What is our crime? Wanting to be a teacher?”, she said.
Kindergarten educator Cristina Gonçalves, 54, also underlines the impact of these relocations on the youngest: “It doesn't do any good for children to always move from one place to the other, they can't create bonds, and that's noticeable”.
For Cristina Gonçalves, it is incomprehensible how the Government says it is concerned with the students, but “then it forgets that teachers are also parents and have children”.
In Cristina's case, the biggest concern is her parents, who will be alone again. In the framework for three years, she has competed for a place in all schools from “Valença à Venda do Pinheiro”. From Lisbon onwards she didn't try, because “it was too far from home”.
“It will be a huge expense. We pay to work. These next few years will serve only for time of service. We don't refuse anything, we always continue to work”, she says.
Cristina acknowledges that the ministry has made an effort to anticipate the release of the placement lists. In her more than thirty years in the profession, there were times when she had to stay in hotels, when the lists were released on 28 August: “So many times we were working in schools without having a home”, she recalls.
Other teachers have commented, “A person feels unmotivated. I'll be working more than 300 kilometers from home, worried about my parents, who have no one to help them, worried about the money that doesn't come and tired of travelling on weekends. This is not good for anyone."
Some teachers who have been placed 100 kilometers from home have chosen to make the home-school trips every day. They discovered that travelling 200 kilometers a day was cheaper than renting a house in the area they have been placed.
One teacher told the Lusa news agency that she didn't mind working “50 or 60 kilometers from home”, because it allowed her to make the trip daily. With a baby still breastfeeding and a little girl in the 1st cycle, she was placed in Vila Franca de Xira, 285 kilometers from her home.
“Nobody realises that this doesn't just affect us, it affects the whole family”, warned the mother, who has experienced almost two decades of instability, jumping from school to school in successive contracts.
Classes start in mid-September, but next week, teachers have to report to schools to prepare for a new school year that will be more demanding, as the plan for recovering lost learning during confinement starts.
