The Council has finally put the procedures in motion to build a temporary school in Orihuela Costa. It has now published the tender for a contract to prepare the plot chosen to house the prefabricated classrooms of the CEIP number 20. The location is a municipal plot on Calle Níspero, parallel to the Villamartín road, which housed the CEIP Playas de Orihuela, also in temporary accommodation, six years ago.
The publication of the tender document comes just 3 weeks after parents and teachers staged a mass demonstration in front of the Playa Flamenca Town Hall. At the rally, which spread inside the municipal building, organisers confessed to being completely fed up with the overcrowding in the classrooms on the Orihuela coast as a result of the constant and continued increase in the number of students and lack of school accommodation.
The cost of the preparation is significantly higher than initially planned. In September, the PP-Vox government team gave the green light to the approval of a surplus amount of money from previous years, 60,000 euros, which was subsequently never used. The budget for this new contract amounts to 215,712.92 euros (VAT included). An amount for which companies can prepare their submissions until July 29.
After criticism of the successive delays in the building of the new centre, the council has justified it by saying that the requirements of the current regional government are different from those of its predecessors in Alicante. They argue that the initial allocation of 60,000 euros was to build the school as a single storey but that the requirement now is to construct it on two levels, something more difficult to do as the chosen plot is on a slope.
The project also includes the construction of the necessary infrastructure so that the prefabricated cabins will have an electrical connection, telecommunications, water supply and sanitation. Thus, trenches will be dug to introduce each of these services independently.
The prefabricated classrooms will be placed on a reinforced concrete foundation accessible by access ramps to the classrooms. The exterior, meanwhile, will be equipped with a garden area, a children’s play area, a sports court (which will be repainted) and five projectors on a pole. All these installations, warns the authoring studio, will have a useful life of five years.
