The population we work with doesn’t come from downtown only, and they’re not middle-class families from San Miguel, but rather in many cases, there is a large part of the population that comes from the district neighborhoods and have problems to have a normal secondary school experience.
It’s a population that to me, is characterized by its huge diversity, you know? There is a big difference between the student entering the 1st year and the student finishing the 6th year, they end up being completely different.
It’s a population that— I always say this, we have everything, from Palermo Hollywood to, I don’t know, the most needy place you can find. And their perspectives on gender are also very very broad. And gender-neutral pronouns is something we’ve been working on theoretically for a long time when we ran the Comprehensive Sexuality Education program. It’s really funny, we always ask some of the students, when we start to intervene— I mean, sometimes the parents come over and they have more problems than the student and sometimes they leave feeling quite surprised. What I mean is, to us, the fact that Roberto wants to be María, for instance, is not a problem at all. María will decide, and this is something that fills us with pride, you know?
Many of the students with these characteristics seek a place in our school. And they are given support and treated with respect in this sense. We even have a couple of teachers in the same situation, so as a result we also have, so to speak, a population with such broad characteristics. From the socio-economic point of view, we have students from Bellavista, Moreno, Hurlingham, Tigre, from separate places, from Pilar, I mean, it’s a population that sometimes is surprising to us; in fact sometimes we also get a little worried about the expectations we arouse, you know? I mean, sometimes we get parents or students that come with a certain expectation and sometimes we feel a little scared and wonder if we’ll be up to the task.
A large number of times we get the feeling that we are, and occasionally that we aren’t, but it’s something that fills us with pride, and besides, it’s a very politicized population.