The Government has appealed the ultimatum of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) to introduce 25% of Spanish in schools, alleging that it is preparing new regulations and that changing the linguistic projects at the end of the course would cause “serious damage” and a large “economic impact”.
This is stated in the appeal that the Catalan government presented to the TSJC so that it suspends the fifteen-day period it gave it to comply with the sentence, which expires next Tuesday, and recognizes that the Department of Education is “carrying out the actions necessary to legally guarantee the use of the two official languages” in teaching.
The TSJC must resolve in the coming days whether to suspend the established term, while waiting for the Council of Statutory Guarantees to issue the opinion requested by Vox, JxCat and En Comú Podem on the bill on the use and learning of the official languages ??that PSC, ERC, JxCat and En Comú Podem intended to approve in a single reading in Parliament.
The request for the opinion threatens to disrupt the plans of the PSC, ERC, JxCat and En Comú Podem to approve the new law -which plans to reaffirm Catalan as the “vehicular language” in schools and, at the same time, recognizes Spanish as the language of “curricular use” – before the maximum period set by the TSJC.
The Council of Statutory Guarantees now has seven working days to decide whether the new law complies with the Statute and the Constitution, so only if it issues its report with unusual speed will it be possible to hold the full approval of the law on Monday or next Tuesday, to present it to the TSJC together with a decree law that provides for the parallel approval of the Government of Pere Aragonès.
The letter from the Generalitat reminds the TSJC that “what cannot be expected is that the regulatory initiatives initiated are approved without complying with the mandatory procedures” and that it is not ruled out that “at any time” the Government uses “another instrument normative, even faster in its processing, such as the decree law, to regulate the linguistic uses in the school”.
The Legal Office rejects the “normative inactivity” that the sentence attributes to the Generalitat and emphasizes that “the wording that is wanted to give” to the articles that modify the law of linguistic uses in education are “sufficiently explicit to verify what the result is persecuted” with the new regulation.
According to the Government, the TSJC has altered the terms of its own sentence when it orders the approval of “internal service instructions” in fifteen days to guarantee 25% of Spanish, despite the fact that the State Attorney’s Office – which promoted the lawsuit with the government of the PP- recognizes that the Generalitat has “freedom to choose the best measures to adopt” to apply the ruling.
The Government insists that it is up to it “to decide at its discretion which is the best or best regulatory instruments” to apply the sentence and stresses that it has already begun the approval procedures for “a legal provision and a regulatory provision to deal with the problem, in addition to ordering A study on the sociolinguistic reality in schools.
For the Generalitat, the linguistic rights of the students, linked to their right to education, and the obligations of the teachers “cannot be modified with internal service instructions” as required by the TSJC, for what is being carried out a modification of the law and a regulatory deployment in order to “regulate and clarify the regulatory framework” on the language in the classroom.
The appeal also appeals to the “serious damage that the immediate execution of the sentence can cause to the entire educational community” “at this stage of the school year”, which would force the modification of linguistic projects, the alteration of the programming of classes and timetables and the change both the dynamics and the didactic material of the subjects.
This would be “a totally counterproductive measure for students and teachers, which would alter the normal functioning of all classrooms,” adds the letter, which argues that the TSJC’s ultimatum would require changing “at least one schedule for each of the most of 250,000 groups” this school year and “all individualized plans” in force in the centers.
Redefining the programming of each subject “when the course has already entered its final phase and all the efforts of the students and teachers are focused on taking the last classes and exams of the third evaluation” would mean, for the Generalitat, “an upheaval for the centers”.
The resource also brandishes the “economic impact” that would entail having to change school materials, both didactic and curricular, a cost that a report provided to the TSJC estimates at 20 or 22 euros per student, which adds up to 20.5 million euros.
Changing the teaching materials now would mean, according to the resource, “an enormous amount of work unattainable at this time of the course from the point of view of the workload of the affected teachers, who are in the final evaluation phase”, as well as a ” economic impact” for families for the purchase of textbooks.
