More than six thousand teachers placed in schools far from home applied for the travel allowance, with 460 applications being rejected “because the distance was less than 70 kilometers”, revealed this Tuesday, November 25th, the Ministry of Education.
“To date, 6,168 applications have been submitted, of which 460 were invalidated due to the distance being less than 70 kilometers. There are still 287 applications to be validated”, the press office of the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation (MECI) told Lusa.
According to the guardianship, all the requests so far rejected had the same problem: “Calculations that do not comply with the law”, which defines that the distance between home and school must be greater than 70 kilometers, counted by road.
Jornal de Notícias (JN) revealed on Monday that not all teachers were able to submit applications because the platform where they enter the data did not recognize the coordinates as valid or assigned a shorter distance to the routes.
MECI guarantees that teachers “can complain” and, if it turns out that they are right, “the result is changed”.
Regarding those who continue to wait for the travel allowance to be validated, Education Minister Fernando Alexandre assured at the beginning of this month that payments will be made retroactively until the end of the year.
Extraordinary support for travel was one of the measures launched by the Government to combat the shortage of teachers, trying to attract teachers to schools with staff shortages.
This academic year, support was extended to all public schools, with an increase for those placed in one of the schools identified as priority.
The support amounts vary depending on the distance: They range from 150 euros per month for distances between 70 and 200 kilometers, and can reach 500 euros if the teacher teaches more than 300 kilometers from home and in a school considered to be in deficit.