The government of Tarcisio de Freitas (Republic) is preparing to reorganize public schools in São Paulo, dividing units with more than 1,200 registered students. The division is expected to take place before the start of the 2026 academic year.
The idea is that each of them offers one educational stage and has its own management team. Thus, two schools will be able to operate in the same building.
The state Ministry of Education, led by Renato Vedder, claims that reducing the size of schools would facilitate educational administration, as each unit would be exclusively responsible for one educational stage.
Instead of a single management team being responsible for a school, for example, with 1,800 students enrolled in three levels of education (early years, final years of primary and secondary school) and up to three terms, they will look after just one course.
The list of schools has not been released.
The reorganization is supposed to affect about a hundred schools in the state – most of them in major cities, such as the capital, São Paulo, and Guarulhos and Campinas, which are older. According to the secretariat, out of 3,000 government schools, about 300 have more than 1,200 students.
School principals said Bound Who were notified of the project last week and informed that they must formalize their membership by Wednesday (12). They complain that there is little time given to analyze the proposal and consult with teachers, students and families.
The government confirmed that outreach to schools took place only last week, but said that conversations on the topic had already begun in UREs (regional education units, responsible for a group of schools in each region) for a longer period.
The average number of students in the state network is 600 students per school, says Michel Minerbo, Sédoc’s undersecretary for education. Therefore, they considered large units to be those with an enrollment rate twice the average, i.e. more than 1,200 enrollments.
“We identified 330 large schools and proposed desegregation. These schools have a very large school population, which makes management difficult, and the principal has to deal with a very large team of teachers, which hinders the improvement of educational outcomes,” he says.
It guarantees that no educational stage in these schools will be closed. She says there will only be a reorganization of the way it is presented.
“Schools in general will be regrouped in shifts. So, we will have one school operating in one phase in the morning and one in another phase in the afternoon. No students or teachers will be moved to another school building.”
The idea of reorganizing the São Paulo State network, the largest in the country with more than 3 million students, is not new. Ten years ago, then-Governor Geraldo Alckmin proposed dividing the schools so they would serve only one level of education.
The 2015 plan envisaged closing more than 90 schools and converting another 754 schools to serve only one stage, affecting more than 300,000 students.
Without discussion or consultation with school communities, the project faced strong backlash from students who occupied dozens of units to protest the closure.
The Department of Education says that “desegregation” and the resulting reduction in school size is consistent with what the academic literature suggests. Schools with a larger number of students, number of shifts and teaching phases are more complex in educational management.
“The main goal of desegregation is to increase the proximity and communication between the management team and educational coordinators with the teacher group,” says a document submitted to school administrators.
The document also notes that by reducing the size of schools, it will be possible for management teams to “improve the ability to identify learning gaps and create recovery strategies.”
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