Families accept huge long weekends this year, but they request a better conciliation

"It is not an abrupt change, the Christmas and Easter periods continue in a similar way, it is a step towards the balance", the regional Minister of Education Genaro Alonso, who hopes there are no drawbacks to follow this line in future years, defended in the corridors out of the Board. "Most people consider it normal and reasonable", Clara Díaz Alonso said, of the Federation of Parents Associations (FAPAS) "Miguel Virgós", who finds the "huge long weekends" from the 1st to the 5th of November and from the 6th to the 10th of December an opportunity to "balance" the other two school periods of the school year. However, Díaz Alonso finds the mini-vacations generated around the holiday of November 1st "circumstantial", and "next year will vary and will be a long weekend of only two days and, the following, just one", she said. Of course, the families understand that the current calendar, of 177 school days - to which each municipality will have to add one or two local holidays-, which has been arrived "by consensus", already presents "problems" in the field of reconciliation between family and work life. "School days are a debate that has always been on the table and nobody wants to be serious about it. It's time to talk about real conciliation", the president of the Federation of Parents Associations said. Her personal circumstances led her to having to apply for two days off at work - on May 12th and 15th - since they are holidays and, therefore, non-school days at her children's school in Llanera.

The "huge long weekend" of November, however, should not be repeated, parents argue, and unions remind that, although next calendar does not show any major differences compared to this year, they do believe that it should be governed more by pedagogical criteria, in the opinion of Beatriz Quirós, from SUATEA, instead of by the concatenation of holidays in the ordinary work calendar. "Two years ago the proposal of the Board of Teaching Staff was not taken into account. It is a topic to be retargeted in the future", Quirós says about the model of Cantabria, where a week of holidays is marked for every seven teaching weeks.

In France, where they follow a model with similar characteristics, this distribution generates a lot of satisfaction in the hotel and leisure sectors, since holidays arrive sequentially by regions. "There, the calendar is not imposed by the moon and here it is. As long as we attend to esoteric criteria, we will not be able to move forward", Quirós said ironically, referring to the organization of quarters based on Holy Week dates. The AMPE union believes that the calendar is distributed in a proportional way in the three quarters. "With the long weekends the quarters are divided and there are breaks in the middle of quarters that are too long", the Secretary General Gumersindo Rodríguez says.