translated from Spanish: SEP hasn’t paid salaries to Prepa tutors online for 5 months

When Isabel del Castillo, 33, was accepted as a facilitator in the Prepa Online program in 2016 she did not know that teaching would like her so much that she would end up studying a master’s degree in teaching, even though she was licensed in Law. But contrary to personal satisfaction, labour uncertainty on the part of the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) has been a constant.
The SEP has been spearheading the Online Prepa program since 2014 which sought to be an option for young people and adults to study the upper middle level in a non-in-person manner. This would eliminate entrance exams as a requirement to enter a high school and, being distance education, allowed students to take classes at any time possible.
Read more: 98% cut in The Online Prepa budget puts the studies of 140,000 young people at risk
While the program is about to turn six and until 2019 it had 147 thousand 180 active students, of which 38.6% are men and 61.4% women, the situation of those who support students to improve their online learning has not improved and this year even worsened because they added five months without payment.
At the beginning of the program, the PMI still had them registered in assimilated fees and the payments came directly from the unit and even had social security, as established in the original model promoted by the former Secretary of Higher Media Education, Rodolfo Tuirán.
But from 2016, the SEP decided that the IPN Research and Advanced Studies Center (CINVESTAV) where the technology program operated, also took over to organize a tender to hire a company that would take over the staff, that is, implement an outsourcing model.
Isabel del Castillo explains that every year there is a delay of two or three months in the payment of her salary for each module taught because the SEP takes that long to hire a company that will take care of making the contracts and paying the tutors and facilitators.
This means that the PMI and the facilitators, in this model, exercise the teaching function, and the tutors, with psychopedagogical activity, have no employment relationship and therefore lack benefits or seniority like the other teachers of the public education system.
During the first quarter of each year the tender for the contracting of the outsourcing company is launched and concreted, which then contracts and disperses the payments of the tutors and facilitators amounting to 9,800 pesos per month, corresponding to a module.
However, this year, René Bello Sánchez, administrative director of Prepa Online, reported that the resources had not been exercised due to the austerity decree that sent the entire public administration to cut 75% of the general service budget as a measure to obtain resources and face the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although they have not received payment, the more than a thousand active facilitators and tutors have not suspended their work in the program that has more and more students enrolled. The groups went from having 50 students to adding 100, each delivering 2 jobs a week, implying that each facilitator reviews 200 jobs per week.
Mariana, who has been renamed for fear of reprisals, says facilitators work an average of 110 hours a month, time that is accounted for on the platform, but there are also tasks outside of it that are not paid for. This work is “not compensated for in physical or emotional and less economic health,” he regrets, but in contrast to job abuse, working with students who are 14 years old and up to 80 and knowing their stories is inspiring, he says.
In fact, according to official figures 50.8% of students are young people between 13 and 29 years old and 49.2% adults aged 30 and over; in addition, 59.6% of the total have children.
This is not the first attack on the Program, the Federation wanted to allocate 98% less budget by 2020, which practically meant its extinction because it could not have operated with only 6 million pesos that was being fore envisaged.
Thanks to student complaints and pressure from facilitators and tutors, they managed to increase the budget to 220 million pesos and the program remained for this year, although teachers remain unpaid.
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Original source in Spanish