With 17 municipalities, Marajó archipelago is one of the poorest regions in Brazil and is always at the bottom of lists designed to measure social development, health, sanitation and quality of life in the country.
With education, it is not different. The problems are many: high failure rates, literacy levels below the national average and mismatch between student's age and school grade.
On top of this, is the challenge of school transport in the Amazon region, crisscrossed by rivers and marked by long distances, besides the constant lack of school meals and the low appreciation of education professionals.
In 2022, the Court of Auditors of the Municipalities of Pará (TCM-PA) compiled data in a report presenting the main problems of education in the archipelago.
The document also points out possible solutions. In the opinion of Antônio José Guimarães, the counselor who presides over the Court, monitoring municipal public policies helps to guide the use of public resources.
"Marajó stands out nationally with alarming educational data. We are monitoring to find out precisely if the money invested is bringing real benefit to the population", he explains.
According to the organ's diagnosis, only 14% of students finish elementary school with a high level of proficiency in Portuguese.
When it comes to mathematics, the number drops to 5%. The distortion between age and grade, characterized when the student is at least two grades behind, reaches 51.29%.
Since the release of this report, some actions have already been put into practice. Based on an agreement with the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), the project carried out training with more than 500 teachers.
In addition, a partnership with Instituto Reúna carried out an assessment with 42,000 students, focusing on finding out their main individual difficulties.
In addition, the group has promoted qualifications so that municipalities comply with rules that guarantee access to more resources.
This was the case of Chaves, a municipality that began to receive funds from Dinheiro Direto na Escola Program.
The Government of Pará launched the Alfabetiza Pará Program in Marajó, in the first half of March, with the aim of accelerating expanded coverage of literacy among students in the 1st and 5th grade of elementary school.
"Alfabetiza Pará is a special program. It meets our difficulties and needs, especially in Marajó. To make public policies in the metropolitan area of a state is easy, what is difficult is to extend and reach the more remote areas", declared the mayor of Breves, Xarão Leão.
Ribeirinhos need more resources for education, says counselor
According to counselor Cézar Colares, who coordinates the Articulation Bureau for the Effectiveness of Education Policy in the Marajó Archipelago, it is important that these facts come to light and that more and more people and organizations can unite forces towards improvements.
The study identified several other educational problems in Marajo: an example is the cycle of hiring and firing teachers – admitted at the beginning of the school year and dismissed during vacation periods.
Resources for school meals are also below the real demand of the archipelago. In March 2023, the resource was readjusted by the Federal Government, from R$0.36 to R$0,50 per day / per student, but there is a special group of educational units, formed by indigenous and quilombola schools, which still receive R$ 0.86 per day / per student.
Colares advocates that riverside students be included in this group.
"We need to sensitize our group of federal deputies from Pará to propose this law, which would benefit not only Marajó, but all riverside schools in Pará. We are debating solutions on how to provide quality school meals, especially in parts of the rural area with no electricity to store and preserve meals, resulting in higher costs as food depends on transport by boat to arrive, which is also expensive. The Amazon faces very particular issues that need to be managed in a specific way. The main challenge is 'literacy in the right grade’. We went to the municipalities to confirm the official information and also raise awareness on the subject. The group's experience has been very positive, as we discuss every month aiming at a model of collective governance, seeing what each one can do. And we're working on it an articulation with the Ministry of Education to resume stopped works", says Colares.
Education numbers in Marajó
1,255 schools in 17 municipalities
1,112 (88.6%) schools in rural areas
143 (11.4%) schools in the urban area
172,573 students enrolled
68,722 (39.8%) students in the urban area
103,851 (60.2%) students in rural areas
Average failure rate:
17.22% in the initial grades
15.21% in the final grades
Distortion between age and grade:
33.25% of the total number of students in the initial grades
51.29% of the total number of students in the final grades
Proficiency from 5th to 9th grade:
14% of students are proficient in Portuguese at a level considered adequate for the end of elementary school
5% of students are proficient in math at a level considered adequate for the end of elementary school
Transport and school lunch are the main problems
Working as a teacher in Salvaterra for 32 years, Creuzuite Araújo believes she is a born teacher but remembers that it takes determination and tenacity to overcome daily challenges, especially those related to food and transportation.
She says that the back roads are not always suitable for school buses, because of the rains that turn everything into mud. It is a problem that causes many students to miss evaluation periods. Some communities go as long as two weeks without classes.
"When lunch comes, it's very little. There are students who leave their homes in the community of Mangueiras, for example, and walk five kilometers to the riverside, where they take the rabeta [small motor boat] to cross the river and then take the school transport. And, arriving here, there's nothing to eat. It's sad and recurrent, in addition to causing school dropout", she points out.
The teacher also points out that there are serious reading and writing problems. There are many students going to high school who failure on classroom functional skills, a scenario that was aggravated after the covid-19 pandemic.
"We are working to make up for these two years, since internet access is precarious in distant communities and the pandemic caused a delay in the learning process of many young students", she highlights, adding that there is a lack of public employment positions for teachers and managers, and the same holds true for psychologists and social workers in schools.
INCLUSION
The social worker Luce Mara Lobato, from the Movement for Inclusion in Marajó project, believes that access to education has improved in the archipelago, but it is still more difficult for people who live in rural areas.
Besides, there is also problems concerning the inclusion of students who live in special conditions, such as those ones within the autism spectrum. She notes that the main complaints of Marajoara families are related to the difficulty for taking the children to and back from school.
"Transport is precarious and there are not always support teachers for children with special needs, which impacts on learning. Management does not fulfill the needs of the population at the proper pace. It is hard, since education is a right and, if it is not universally offered, the welfare of children and families is being violated. It is a sad scenario because our black and Amazonian children already grow up deprived of several other basic fundamental rights", she laments.
Amam approves TCM-PA actions
According to Guto Gouvêa, mayor of Soure and current president of the Association of Municipalities of the Marajó Archipelago (Amam), the actions carried out by the Court of Auditors of the Municipalities of Pará has been important to provide a technical approach for each problem.
He says that the scenario has improved in schools that have agreements with the Government of Pará, which has increased the financial support for school meals and transportation.
"But school meals continue to be our main bottleneck, especially in Western Marajó, where everything is done by river. It's called 'Custo Marajó' [Marajó cost]. In Soure, for example, we only have three rural schools, with less than 100 students. It is easier to take food, adapt menus. But in other municipalities the number of rural schools is very expressive, with units too far from each other. But we always try to attract students with quality school meal. In Soure, more than 60% of the meals come from family farming, a model that can be replicated. There are many struggles, we have few resources, but our priority now is to increase the numbers that measure the quality of education and fight for the recognition of riverside villages as traditional communities, this would improve a lot the availability of resources", he argues.
The main problems pointed out by TCM-PA in Marajó
Management
In 15 municipalities (88%) there is no management plan for the education departments and school units.
In 14 municipalities (82%) there is no integrated management platform.
In 16 municipalities (94%) the choice of directors is based on political indication, without observing technical-pedagogical criteria.
In the 17 municipalities (100%) there is no periodic evaluation policy for the education system covering students by grade.
In the 17 municipalities (100%) there are no specific pedagogical strategies and initiatives to combat illiteracy, age-grade distortion and the low score in the Basic Education Development Index.
In the 17 municipalities (100%) the 200 school days minimum are not being fulfilled in the regular school year.
Teachers
In 12 municipalities (71%) the number of employees is insufficient.
In the 17 municipalities (100%) the number of tenured teaching professionals in the education system is below the target of 18 students per teacher, established by the National Education Plan and expired deadline in 2017.
In the 17 municipalities (100%) the salary advantages of tenured teaching professionals are not paid to temporary employees.
Food
In 100% of the municipalities, the financial resources available are insufficient for the purchase of food that ensure the offer of 22-day per month supply of school meals
In 16 municipalities (94%) there is no effective control over suppliers meeting the deadlines for food delivery, nor a distribution schedule for schools
In 100% of the municipalities, there is inadequate space for the storage of purchased food items.
In 100% of the municipalities, the number of nutritionists to monitor food in schools is reduced.
School transportation
In the 17 municipalities (100%) there is inadequacy of “Caminho da Escola” Project’s school transport (boat)
In 100% of the municipalities there are hired vehicles and boats that present precarious situations of comfort, safety, capacity and regularity.
In 4 municipalities (23%) there is no procedure prior to hiring school transport services, such as public bidding, no-bid contract, public call or similar
In 13 municipalities (77%) some preliminary measure is adopted before hiring, but without specifying the routes and real circumstances that directly interfere with the amount of fuel and, therefore, the cost of hiring, such as: duration of journey, number of people on the boats and flow or against-flow of the tide.
Pandemic
In 6 municipalities (35%) teaching methodologies, in-person or remotely, were not provided during the contamination peaks of the covid-19 pandemic.
In the 17 municipalities (100%) the active post-covid-19 pandemic school search did not result in the expected number of enrollments.
Infrastructure
In the 17 municipalities (100%) precarious situations of infrastructure were registered in the school establishments, both in the electrical, hydraulic and physical structure of the buildings, in addition to lack of furniture.
In the 17 municipalities (100%) there are interrupted constructions related to the Articulated Action Plan, signed with the National Fund for the Development of Education.
