The Mérida City Council will consult with Education on the distribution of masks in schools

The Mérida City Council has its third mask distribution plan underway between the city’s primary and secondary schools. The first batch of this latest supply contract was delivered in the last week of the second quarter, just before the holidays.

All the schoolchildren between the ages of three and sixteen in the city brought home a bag with twenty masks. The next one is scheduled for the second week of May. Susana Fajardo, the delegate for Education, explained this morning that there is room to speak with the Ministry of Education until that second installment.

From tomorrow it is no longer mandatory indoors and Fajardo will wait for the decision made by the management teams and the Ministry of Education when the delivered consignment runs out. The delegate explains that from her delegation and from the City Council they are committed to maintaining the deliveries and completing the supply until the end of the course, but that if in the coming weeks the situation returns to normal in the classrooms and both the management teams and the Ministry of Education leave to recommend it, it will not be distributed. The most reasonable thing then is to save the material in case the health situation for the next course worsens and it is again recommended in the classroom.

The current supply contract should have started before Christmas, it was actually planned for the months of January, February and March. But the contracting table of the Mérida City Council left this contest void at first due to lack of solvent concurrent to the call. The offer had to be restarted again and it was put out to tender again in mid-January. What was delaying the initial plans. The process was definitively closed on April 1. After this second contest, the award contract was signed with Igraex and Trazos for 214,000 euros to deliver 724,000 masks divided into four deliveries in bags of 20 units. Both companies concurred forming a temporary union for this municipal competition.

As in the two previous campaigns, the City Council is responsible for paying for the material, the successful bidder for supplying it once the delivery dates have been closed with the Consistory, and the schools for distributing it among their students.

The Mérida City Council has been distributing masks in the 29 schools of Mérida since the students returned to the classrooms after confinement. The first time it was included in the municipal school safety plan, which also included the reinforcement of the cleaning staff during school hours. This first installment was made for almost two months to help families. The initiative was very well received in the centers. All the management teams positively valued the distribution and the City Council then promised to repeat it to help families with the cost of masks.