Spain: The crisis forces school cafeterias to open in summer

Associations of volunteers and local authorities try to ensure a full meal for children from the poorest families.

Jasmín, Mari Carmen and Carlos Alberto will not have a summer break. Along with thousands of children, both immigrants and Spanish, they will continue to attend school throughout the summer to participate in extracurricular activities. This is the excuse that is used so they won’t feel discriminated against. The sad reality is that they try to hide from the children the fact that this is the only way to have a full meal during the day, just as the school cafeteria provided throughout the entire winter.

This is not new. For the last two summers, when the crisis worsened for the most disadvantaged families, local groups, volunteers and town councils started to warn of the risk to those children if they did not continue having a regular meal when school closed during July and August. It was not until 2014 that the problem was made official in Spain, and the Ombudsman had to intervene to get the government to consider the demands being made by all kinds of organizations as well as by local and regional authorities. With cuts in education, health and social welfare, the government comes to the rescue of the banks whilst there is no one to rescue the people. In fact, even in winter, they have reduced free school meals that allow children of families with fewer economic resources to enjoy a full and balanced meal at least once a day. Teachers have been warning for a long time that children were coming to school without having eaten breakfast and were fainting in class. Their parents, without work and with little social assistance, can barely cover basic living costs.

Some autonomous communities like Andalucía, the Canary Islands, Catalonia, Aragon and the Balearic Islands have announced that they will open schools to provide the children with something to eat during the summer. Meanwhile, the Basque Country, the Valencian Community, Murcia, Navarra, La Rioja, Galicia, Madrid, Castilla y León and Cantabria will not. Some of these communities have opted to look for a solution that represents a middle ground and use the summer schools as a means to distribute food. Others have given the local authorities the option of opening schools to give children something to eat in the summer “if they consider it necessary”. And behind all this, there is always the underlying dilemma of who pays: the central, the autonomous/regional, or the local government.

According to the latest report from UNICEF on children in Spain, 2,306,000 children (27% of the child population) live below the poverty line in Spain. These are minors who frequently have their main meal in the school cafeteria. If we analyze this data in terms of autonomous communities, Navarra and the Basque Country have not considered it necessary to open the school cafeterias in summer and nor have they received requests to do so from their local governments. It should be noted that both autonomous communities are the richest in Spain. Conversely, Galicia refuses to open them because it believes that this could “generate excessive visibility” to those cases and could result in “discrimination” for the recipients. La Rioja, using the same rationale, supports “more discreet” measures because, according to its president, the problem “is not that serious” in the region.

In the Valencian Community the position is similar. The Valencian government says that malnutrition should be addressed by “help for the entire family” and adds that to this end “it is working much more ambitiously.” The Valencian government announced that they would allocate 1.2 million euros for organizations and municipalities to address this problem in summer. Nor have they opened school cafeterias in Castilla or León, since the Executive of the Popular Party believes that they already have a “comprehensive and effective” model to ensure sufficient food within the family by coordinating 23 programmes with more than 100,000 beneficiaries. In the Madrid Community the cafeterias that have been opened were not made available because of a decision by the regional government, which is not in favour of such measures, and whose president says that “there is no problem with child malnutrition.” However, they have offered support to the town councils that decide to do so, as is the case with Castilla La Mancha, where they collaborate with municipalities that have made school cafeterias available. Cantabria has not taken an official position, like the Balearic Islands and Asturias, whose child population has been supported financially by local or popular initiatives.

On the other hand, the government of Aragon has opened school cafeterias, “but far from all” in the region. It has applied as a criterion the number of food grants provided in each centre throughout the school year. In Catalonia, and for the first time, educational establishments have been authorised to open six hours a day, from Monday to Friday, to carry out recreational and educational activities that also include two meals for the children. More than 2,000 children under the age of 17 have benefited from this initiative, according to the Catalan government. Moreover, they are following a similar path in the Canary Islands with a unique initiative consisting of language immersion workshops in schools that include cafeteria services for children of immigrants. There are 174 centres offering this summer activity, as compared to 132 last year. Andalucía, with a socialist government, also repeated its experience and has left cafeterias open this year, like it did last summer for the first time. In the region of Murcia, just as it did during Christmas and Easter, the social services of municipalities and other nonprofits, as well as entities that specialise in providing help to disadvantaged persons, have made education-centre cafeterias available according to demand. For its part, Extremadura, which already opened its cafeterias last year, maintains that it will do so “as often as necessary,” although it has simultaneously implemented summer camps with recreational and leisure activities, such as healthy eating workshops that provide fresh food to children with limited economic resources.

In the middle of summer, certainly the so-called “activity centres” have opened with the dual role of feeding the most vulnerable children in this country. And this is at a time when the state’s social role is being replaced by popular mobilisation, volunteer groups and local associations. This movement, that began on the streets as something against the state, has a dual function: that of helping the poor, a neighbour in need. Just as it was during the Civil War, when Spaniards learned the meaning of the word “solidarity.”