A atuação do conselho escolar em um centro de educação de tempo integral da rede estadual do Amazonas

Abstract

The present study has as main objective to identify the reasons why the School Council of an Educational Center of Integral Time (CETI), of the state education network of Amazonas, located in the city of Manaus, is not acting as an instrument of democratic management. Thus, the choice for the subject is justified by the need of this collegiate in improving its performance in the quest for the democratization of school management and, at the same time, the quest for the quality of teaching. For this, a research was carried out with the collegiate in order to find the possible factors that hinder the performance of the school council. However, a study on the implementation of school councils, which took place during the 1980s - in the context of political openness in Brazil - to the present day was carried out, highlighting, in this historical narrative, the Federal Constitution of 1988, which established democratic management as a principle of public education, as well as the Law of Guidelines and Bases, Law 9394/96, which reaffirmed democratic management as a constitutional principle. Also at this stage, the School Board and the democratic management in the public teaching system of the Amazonas were approached in the local context, that is, in the researched school. This way, evidencing the description of the management case. The theoretical references that grounded our reflections on democratic management and concepts of participation, autonomy and decentralization are found in the works of Paro (2004, 2001), Luck (2000), Mendonça (2000) and Antunes (1997). The methodology of the work was developed through qualitative research, with interviews, semi-structured scripts, applied to the members of the School Council and the analysis of documents referring to the collegiate, at the federal, state and local levels. In this way, it was verified, through the analyzes, some reasons that make difficult the effective performance of the School Council as a mechanism of participation in the school. Among these reasons, we can highlight the existence of a council that is only activated to legitimize some decisions of the school management; the lack of knowledge, on the part of the members of the School Council, of the legislation that bases it in the schools of basic education, as well as its functions and attributions; the lack of knowledge of the members about their duties as counselors and the absence of a plan of action. Faced with such challenges, three proposals have been organized in the Educational Action Plan, such as: training course for counselors, drawing up an action plan and disseminating information about the school council for school and community officials. All of these proposals were selected with the aim of contributing to the School Council, so that it becomes a more active body and that consolidates with a space of participation in the promotion of democratic management in the school. In this way, understanding the School Council as a complex subject, which is far from exhausted. This work is not intended to present formulas for overcoming challenges, but to present a contribution to the debate about democratic management through school boards.