© Telam
The Ministry of Education has 80,000 laptops ready for delivery to public high school students, to be distributed at the beginning of classes. After the relaunch of Connect Equality Plan, its stated goal is that in 2022 all students from first to third year have a device, although the purchase of netbooks already had problems last year because the supplies for their assembly are imported. To have a dimension of this difficulty, it is worth taking into account two numbers: Of 640,000 compromised computers, the companies only handed over 290,000 to the government.
The Education portfolio negotiates this breach, which stems from a productive downturn: “Argentine” netbooks are not 100 percent national industry, but rather a majority of imported components are assembled here.
“We have the political decision to reduce the digital divide”
The roadmap for the relaunch of Connect Equality, explained in Education to Page 12, consists in distribute the remainder of the netbooks acquired in 2021 -there is a second batch that only needs to be loaded with software and packaged- and call one new tender for the purchase of one million devices.
“We have the political decision to reduce the digital divide. If in the midst of the pandemic all our kids had had a computer, they would have been able to study in much better conditions,” said the Minister of Education this morning, Jaime Perczyk, speaking to AM 990 radio.
Perczyk recalled that in 2015, the government of Cristina Kirchner had distributed 5 million computers to public school students. “There was zero digital divide. The kids in high school, their teachers, the kids in special education, those in teacher training had computers. And suddenly, for four years there were no more computers. Do we want zero digital divide? Well… those who cut off (Connect Equality) clearly didn’t. There is a cost that former president Mauricio Macri has to bear for this.”
The official assured that the government It will arrive in March “with more than 500 thousand computers distributed to the boys of the public secondary school”, between the netbooks that have already been delivered and those that will be assigned that month.
At the same time, works are being carried out to provide connectivity to schools, bringing the internet to the buildings and making the wiring so that all the classrooms have access to the use of the network. The work plan foresees providing connectivity to 2,500 schools before the end of March and advancing with another 2,500 school buildings per month, until the end of the year.
In this way, the project is that by the end of 2022, 90 percent of public school students have connectivity in the classroom and 1.5 million netbooks have been distributed among secondary schools.
delivery of books
On the other hand, in two weeks President Alberto Fernández is going to announce the delivery of Language and Mathematics manuals for all students and teachers of public primary schools and zero-fee private schools.
The modality will be one by one, that is to say that each student can have their manuals. “The school has to function as the leveling environment, and that has to be built”, concluded Perczyk