Azorean teachers’ union supports postponing the beginning of the school year, arguing that educators should not once again bear the consequences of a national examination process that demanded far more than their professional obligations
There are crises in education that begin in the classroom, and others that arrive there from elsewhere. They are born in regulations, deadlines, administrative decisions and systems designed far from the schools in which their consequences must eventually be absorbed. Yet when those systems falter, it is often teachers, school leaders and staff who become the final line of defense between institutional disorder and the students who depend upon education functioning as it should. This is the argument now being made by the Sindicato dos Professores da Região Açores (SPRA), which has expressed its agreement with a proposal from the Regional Secretariat for Education, Culture and Sport to postpone the opening of the new school year by five working days in Azorean schools offering the third cycle of basic education and secondary education.
Five days may appear insignificant when measured against the length of an academic year. But time in education is never merely a sequence of dates on a calendar. It is preparation, correction, meetings, planning, examinations, administrative work, conversations with students and families, and the largely invisible labor required before the first student enters a classroom in September. In the present case, the proposed five-day postponement carries another meaning: recognition that teachers cannot endlessly be asked to compensate with their own time for failures elsewhere in the educational system.
The SPRA presented its position after participating in a meeting of the Conselho Coordenador do Sistema Educativo Regional. At the center of its argument is the turmoil surrounding the classification of national examinations and the extraordinary demands consequently placed upon teachers, particularly examination markers, school executive bodies and other school employees. According to the union, if the problems in the examination process did not become even more serious, it was because these professionals worked far beyond what could reasonably have been expected of them.
“If the errors in the examination classification process were not more serious and greater in number, this was exclusively due to the extremely high dedication of teachers, particularly the marking teachers and executive bodies, as well as school employees,” the union stated.
That distinction matters. Institutions often speak of professional dedication as an uncomplicated virtue, but dedication can become dangerous when it is transformed into an expectation that workers will continually repair systemic deficiencies through personal sacrifice. The exceptional effort of teachers may save a difficult examination season; it should not become evidence that the system can continue demanding exceptional effort indefinitely.
The SPRA says teachers and school staff went well beyond their normal professional obligations, disregarding working hours when necessary and navigating what it describes as repeated inconsistencies originating with the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation. In the union’s interpretation, those who were supposed to implement the examination system became responsible for preventing its difficulties from producing even greater consequences.
The language used by the union is unusually severe. It identifies the national Ministry, rather than teachers or Azorean schools, as responsible for the disorder and accuses it of responding to the people who sustained the examination process with mistrust and even threats. The SPRA places direct political responsibility on Education Minister Fernando Alexandre, describing him as “the first and principal political person responsible for the chaos that took hold of this process, which had always worked well.”
Beyond the political accusation, however, lies a much older question about education: how much invisible labor can reasonably be demanded from those who teach?
Teaching has always possessed a peculiar relationship with time. The public sees the lesson; much less visible is everything required to make the lesson possible. A school day ends, but the teacher’s work frequently does not. There are assignments to evaluate, lessons to prepare, meetings to attend, students requiring additional attention, administrative requirements to fulfill and increasingly complex systems of assessment and accountability to navigate. During periods of institutional difficulty, this elasticity of teachers’ time can become particularly convenient. Because educators possess a profound sense of responsibility toward students, they often do what is necessary to prevent the institution’s failures from reaching the young people entrusted to them.
But vocation cannot become a substitute for organization. Nor can professionalism mean the permanent surrender of the right to rest. This is the principle underlying the SPRA’s support for postponing the beginning of the academic year. The extension of examination deadlines shortened teachers’ vacation period, while an extraordinary examination session scheduled for September threatened to intensify the pressure precisely when schools should be preparing calmly and deliberately for a new academic year. Without some adjustment, the union argues, teachers could move almost directly from the disruption of one academic cycle into the demands of another, carrying accumulated exhaustion with them.
The consequences of such exhaustion are not limited to teachers. A school cannot sustainably serve students by exhausting the adults responsible for educating them. Rest is therefore not the opposite of professional commitment; properly understood, it is one of the conditions that allows commitment to continue. The teacher who returns to school with time to prepare, think and recover is better positioned to offer students the intellectual attention and human presence that education requires.
This is particularly significant at the beginning of an academic year. September possesses its own emotional geography in every school. Classrooms reopen. New students arrive. Others return older, sometimes changed profoundly by only a few months. Teachers encounter new classes and new challenges. Timetables settle into place, relationships begin to form, expectations are established and the rhythm of an entire school community is created almost at once. There is a difference between beginning such a year prepared and beginning it depleted.
The SPRA’s position is consequently straightforward: teachers should not, in its words, “pay for the incompetence” of the national Ministry. Those who placed professional duty and students’ interests first during the examination crisis should not be penalized again by losing still more of the rest period necessary before returning to school.
The question of the five days therefore acquires symbolic importance beyond the calendar itself. It asks whether an educational system knows how to recognize extraordinary labor once the emergency has passed. Institutions are often eloquent in praising dedication during a crisis. The more difficult test comes afterward, when recognition requires something tangible: time, working conditions, institutional accountability or the willingness to admit that human beings cannot continuously operate under exceptional demands.
There is also an important Azorean dimension to the discussion. The proposal demonstrates the capacity of the regional educational system to consider its own circumstances and respond to pressures affecting schools within the archipelago. The postponement is not presented as lowering educational expectations or diminishing obligations to students, but rather as creating conditions for the school year to begin with the “normality desired and necessary.”
A similar postponement has been decided nationally for secondary education, while the calendar for the third cycle on the mainland remains under consideration. In the Azores, the SPRA supports extending the adjustment across the affected levels so that schools and teachers are not required to absorb simultaneously the consequences of the extraordinary examination period and the organizational demands of reopening.
Behind the institutional language is a very human reality. Schools do not function because calendars say they should. They function because people make them function: teachers who prepare lessons, staff who open buildings, administrators who construct schedules, examination markers who work through stacks of papers, and countless professionals whose names rarely appear in public discussions of educational policy.
Systems can make mistakes. Procedures can fail. Ministries can revise deadlines and regulations. But eventually every administrative decision reaches a human being who must find the additional hour, solve the unexpected problem or remain at work longer than planned.
During the examination crisis, according to the SPRA, Azorean educators repeatedly became those people.
The union is now arguing that the educational system should respond not with another demand, but with recognition.
Five working days will not resolve the deeper questions raised by the examination controversy. They cannot return every interrupted vacation day or erase the fatigue accumulated during an unusually difficult process. They cannot substitute for a serious examination of what went wrong and how similar disruption might be prevented.
But they can establish a principle.
Teachers have obligations to their students, their schools and the public institutions they serve. Those obligations are profound precisely because education matters so profoundly. Yet the institutions governing education possess obligations as well—to organize competently, to respect professional labor and to remember that dedication is not an infinitely renewable resource.
Perhaps that is the lesson contained within these five days. A school year should begin with teachers ready to give something of themselves to their students. It should not begin by asking them to give what the previous one has already taken away.
Based on a story in Diário Insular-José Lourenço-director–Photos from DI, Wikipedia and https://ecoescolas.abaae.pt/escola/escola-secundaria-vitorino-nemesio/