TITLE OF THE PUBLICATION
Drop out in the immigrant population Azuqueca de Henares
SURNAME AND NAME OF AUTHOR(S)
Martín de Juan, Elena y Cámara Alves, Antonio
PUBLISHER
Youth Institute (INJUVE). Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality.
Journal of Youth Studies
PLACE AND DATE OF PUBLICATION
Madrid. 2004
TYPE OF PUBLICATION
Research
LANGUAGE OF THE DOCUMENT
Spanish
LANGUAGE OF THE REVIEW
English
THEMATIC AREA
Integration of immigrants students
DESCRIPTION OF CONTENTS
In the article, the question of the schooling of immigrant students in a municipality in the Autonomous Community of Castile-La Mancha, Azuqueca de Henares, is approached. The authors analyze the main problems that immigrant students suffer:
• The learning of the language.
• The educative underdevelopment that many children present, particularly those coming from Maghrebi origin.
• The incorporation to the level according to their age, instead of according to their knowledge.
• Their parents, in most of the cases, look more after their own adaptation (documents, work, housing, etc.) than after really monitoring their children. This way, adults may prioritize economic matters over school ones.
• Assumption by some of the children of family responsibilities. Most of these families have younger children, so they, especially teenage girls, must sometimes give priority to the caretaking of their siblings while their parents are at work.
• Employment in black economy by teenagers under 16 years old to help in the precarious familiar economy, dropping out early from the educative system to incorporate into the job market even though they have not received appropriate formation.
• Low value given to school and formation in several sectors or families.
• Some children, when they arrive in Spain, are already teenagers, which complicates their integration, both in the higher effort needed to learn the language and in the integration among other students.
• The lack of regularization that affects 20,000 students, which increases the temporary nature of the schooling. The current Immigration Law (Ley de Extranjería) does not permit the access to non-compulsory levels of education to the children of non-regularized immigrants.
• The lack of empathy and of awareness by some teachers towards the cultural differences of several groups.
COMMENTS ON THIS PUBLICATION
This work supposes a valuable contribution to the subject matter, because it presents the process carried out by a municipality that in a few years went from a small municipality to a large, industrialized one, with around 9% of immigrant population. The authors of this work, a social worker and a labor measurer from social services, present and analyze the changes that have occurred regarding immigrant population and its schooling in this municipality.
One of the most valuable contributions of this document is that it presents the process carried out by the institutions to answer to a socio-demographic change that has entailed a change in the necessities of their town. This way, they explain how, when facing the noticed growth of school absenteeism and early school leaving by immigrant students, both by high schools and social services, the Municipal Social Services proposed the creation of a Commission of School Absenteeism and Lack of Schooling, framed within the Regional Plan of Social Integration of Castile-La Mancha. The main objective of the commission was to establish a protocol of action in each of the organizations that were part of it, with the purpose that all the implicated professionals could know what the rest were doing to standardize the actions; and to establish the ways of derivation and returning of the information. Thus, they intended to coordinate with the City Council and to monitor to what extent the registered teenagers where really schooled, and to supervise the most complicated cases and to revise all the cases which had been intervened and the results of such interventions.
Moreover, the Commission pretended to be a platform of investigation to be able to work in the prevention from different statuses of power, thus allowing the realization of a local plan of school absenteeism in the medium term.
Name of Compiler
Rosario del Rey
Name of Institution
University of Seville
Role in the institution
Reseracher
