PROFESSIONAL PRACTICES OF SCHOOL SOCIAL WORKERS IN PROMOTING EQUITY IN TIMES OF COVID 19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

"Children and young people from different social and cultural backgrounds, nationalities, ethnicities access school, but they have not had the same opportunities for school success and to see their right to education and other human rights guaranteed. Intervening with this diversity in a positive way means making difference, not synonymous with stigmatization and school and social exclusion, but rather with school and social inclusion, through the promotion of equity and social justice. The covid 19 pandemic, by electing distance learning, expanded and intensified the risks of dropout and failure of students with a more fragile relationship with the school, accentuating social inequalities and other inequalities and not allowing the multiplicity of their needs to be satisfied, in the sense of its integral development. The increased risk of school dropout and failure is more accentuated in some segments of the population, namely, those with greater social vulnerabilities. The government wanted to respond to the problems of absenteeism and school dropout, child poverty, intra-family violence and mental illness, which were aggravated by the covid-19 pandemic, giving guidance to managers, teachers and technicians to reinvent the role of the school in times of physical distance, quarantine and isolation. In this reinvention, the intervention strategies of the multidisciplinary teams of the schools were highlighted in the identification, signaling and monitoring of risk/danger situations for children and young people and in the articulation with the competent authorities and the community institutions, in promoting the right to education and social protection of children and young people. In these teams, social workers, with a diversified and multi-referenced academic scientific and technical background, have the necessary conditions to intervene in the realization of the right to education because they are able to bring together and promote the collaboration and communication that is essential between knowledge and educational actors for the elaboration of a diagnosis and respective intervention plan, which should focus on the three main domains of the ecological model of assessment in risk/danger situations: the child's developmental needs, the parental skills of the families and the family and ecological factors. Focusing on a qualitative approach, through interviews with social workers who are part of multidisciplinary teams in school clusters, we sought to know how these professionals, in times of pandemic, perceive their functions and tasks, their professional practices and its potential in making the right to education effective and in combating school and social inequalities."