It is Friday, family visit day in the José Martí Integral Formation School (EFI in Spanish), attached to the Ministry of the Interior (MININT).
A spacious classroom located on the second floor is the place for the students to meet with their parents or legal guardians coming to see them. One of the visitors is Manuel Vigil Rivas, father of 16-year-old minor Janny Daniel Fernández Vázquez, who has been enrolled in the school for four months for conduct problems.
“It is an experience no parent would like to see their child go through,” he speaks honestly as he acknowledges his son’s conduct has changed since he enrolled in this school.
When asked about the professors, Vigil Rivas answers “they are great.”
This Friday is also visit day for the students who have spent a period of over three months in the school and have shown good behavior, who can go home for a few days.
Janna Anmara Valdés Diez is picking up the permit at the school reception desk. Her daughter Asuny, who is 14 years old, will go home with her mother for a short visit, based on the progress she has made in this school. “She entered in May 2021 due to a very negative conduct. The rules here have taught her to follow a schedule, to obey. Her conduct has improved a lot,” says her mother.
The mother also confirms the good relationship with the staff. “They have treated her as if she were their daughter, very devoted to her and they are very approachable.”
DISPROVING PRECONCEIVED IDEAS
Regarding the José Martí Integral Formation School and the other 11 centers of this type currently functioning in the country, there have been several opinions that the practice has disproven. Actually, these are transit educational centers, similar to general education schools. The only difference is that the students going to EFIs have special educational needs and there they receive treatment and training to reintegrate them to society.
How and why these teenagers get to these centers? Colonel Luciana Calixto Prieto, deputy chief of the Department for the Care of Minors at MININT, explains that the stay in EFIs is one of the educational measures of the Council for the Care of Minor and provided by the Decree-Law number 64, which rules the system of care for minors with conduct disorders.
“The stay of a student is exceptionally decided, and it depends on the minor’s involvement in an event typified as a crime by the law, or for maintaining a severely aggravated conduct,” the official elaborates. Once the decision has been made, “it has no time limit and it depends on how the minor changes their conduct, which can happen before the period of one year or after, depending of the event that the law typified as crime in which they were involved and, of course, on the family having the conditions, because we look for the potentials of the minor, the family and the surroundings, to be able to teach them.”
Once the measure has been adopted, the students (most of whom are between the ages of 14 and 15 years old, the age limit goes from 12 to 16 years old) are taught the same program of general education, reinforced with special educational treatments, according to the needs and characteristics of each student.
A team composed of psychologists, jurists and psychiatrists, among other specialists, evaluate the evolution of the conduct of each student, on which they work so the student can be able to reintegrate to society.
In general, students spend only one year in these transit schools and when they finish, they go back to general education in their previous schools, for those who are in secondary education, and to the arts and crafts school for those who are in that stage of education. Meanwhile, those who graduate ninth grade are guaranteed the continuation of their studies in the education system, she adds.
Teaching in the center poses a challenge, as the Teaching Director of the school Alicia Hernández Sarmiento, explains: “We keep the student in the grade they were before coming here, although we know they come here with serious learning problems. We work around it and at the end we always fulfill the curriculum of each of the education specialties because here everyone has their space and their place in the teaching area, even if they are all related.”
Teaching spaces are the solely responsibility of the teachers. Officers and other specialists do not take part in it as they perform their educational treatment in the rest of the areas.
The work with the students’ cognitive processes to correct their conduct also has its place and it is run by lieutenant Yelena de las Mercedes Valenzuela Orta, psychologist at the José Martí Integral Formation School.
“Some of our tasks include giving treatment to the kids sent here by the Council for the Care of Minors, and it mainly consists on helping the minor accept the decision taken and their wrongdoings, to understand what is the deviation in their conduct.”
She adds that they also teach them values, habits and rules, and work on their self-esteem, self-control and to identify personal conditions that keep them from having a conduct adjusted to society.
They also work closely with the family. “First, we bring the family close to the school so we can work together, because we cannot guarantee the social reinsertion of the children and teenagers by ourselves, once the applied measures conclude.”
When the children complete their time in the school, they receive follow-up together with the Officer for the Care of Minors in the community, in order to continue working with them and consolidate the work done during their stint in EFI, she goes on.
As to the myths that persist about EFI, she says that part of the society “puts a stigma on these school because they don’t know the characteristics of these centers. It happens that, sometimes, when children have to come here, the parents react in a certain way, but when they come here and we explain to them the treatment we give and they see the results by themselves, they realize their children indeed needed this type of care.”
ABOUT THE MINORS INVOLVED IN THE EVENTS ON JULY 11
Regarding the events on July 11 and 12, 2021 and the minors involved in events that are typified as crimes by the law, there has been a flood on media manipulation. For example, it was said they were imprisoned. In the José Martí Integral Formation School there are six minors who are associated with those events, six boys who received the same educational treatment than the rest of the students.
It is the case of 16 year-old teenager Yeniel González Pérez, who entered this school for an event that the law typifies as a crime he committed on July 11. His father expresses that it is “an experience we have never lived before. I couldn’t accept it at first…, I would say my son could not have done something like that, that he did not deserve something like that, but little by little I understood and realized he made a mistake and he has to fix it, in this case by fixing his conduct.”
“We have been well-treated; I requested a meeting with the Prosecutor and I met with him; I filed a complaint to the Department of Attention to Citizens and they replied to me, I was called here and the senior chief of Care for Minors met with me and explained me in detail that this was not a prison, that they will educate my son here.”
The experience has been a tough one, but, for this father, it has its silver lining. “He is here for a mistake he made, but his behavior, his actions and his relationship with the family and other people has improved very much. At least, his relationship with me has grown stronger; we talk more, we love each other more, we missed each other,” Yeniel’s father says.
On his part, Yeniel – a boy with fluent communication and an almost perfect vocabulary – tells us that everything is going well so far and that he takes part in La Colmenita children’s theater troupe in the school, while he describes in detail every activity he performs in the center. As to his dreams for the future, he says he wishes to continue his studies in Industrial Mechanics and later enroll in the José Antonio Echeverría Technological University of Havana (CUJAE in Spanish).
“There is an upside to every downside and I have learned a lot here. I wish I had never been here, but now that I am I have to do my best and be better than I used to be. I have learned to value more the people by my side, for whom I used to not care that much.”
“I was scared when I got here, thinking this was going to be worse, due to what people say on the streets about places like this. In the end, it was the other way around, teachers here help you, give you advise, speak a lot with you,” he says.
The staff of the José Martí Integral Formation School prides themselves that most of the students who come here successfully reinsert in society. One of the teachers say: “There are some of them who return to the school to visit, to see us. Others are working and have never involved in anything that breaks the law again. For example, there was a Doctor of Epidemiology who came in a visit to the school and said, ‘I was here’ and we replied ‘Yes, in a visit,’ and he said ‘No, I was a student in this school. I am a doctor now’.”
Translated by ESTI
