The traditional Bogotá school that will receive women for the first time after more than 100 years

The Gimnasio Moderno school that was founded in 1914 in the city of Bogotá, as an educational institution only for men, after a century of operation will make a historic change to become a coeducational school.

This will be the case from 2023, where the educational institution will have mixed enrollments for the first time in its history, while in the remainder of this student year they will hold work tables to make the change in the campus.

The educational institution reported that the change is due to the new universal dynamics, where senior positions are held by trained women, and taking the example of NASA aerospace engineer, the Colombian Daniela Trujillo, they point out the importance of mixing in school the qualities and capabilities of the new students.

Now with the transition from Gimnasio Moderno to a mixed school, there are only 5 educational institutions in the capital of the Republic, which only teach classes for male students.

The managers of the Gimnasio Moderno, also pointed out according to studies cited, that bullying is more prone to bullying in environments where only males are present, so the inclusion of women in the campus will help reduce hostility. They also pointed out that exclusive education for one gender is something that is no longer well seen, an obsolete concept.

On the other hand, a study indicated that since the pandemic, about 8,000 cases of school bullying have occurred in the different educational institutions of the national territory. Experts say that in order to combat cases of school violence, parents and teachers of children must be educated about the mechanisms that exist to deal with it, but it must also be resolved from the bottom up: from the education of the child.

According to the NGO Bullying Without Borders, between 2020 and 2021 alone, 8,981 cases of bullying were reported in Colombia.

As a measure to combat this phenomenon, which has been increasing in recent years, the Congress of the Republic issued Law 1620 of 2013, which created the National System of School Coexistence and Training for the Exercise of Human Rights, Education for Sexuality and the Prevention and Mitigation of School Violence.

With this system, schools were forced to create coexistence committees to mitigate and prevent different problems among students, including psychological and physical violence. Thus, within its coexistence policies, each student institution must determine the steps to take when there has been a situation of bullying or school violence among students.

For Beatriz Molina, an expert in criminal law, this has not been enough, as children face different factors that transcend the classroom environment and expands to social networks.

For this reason, he says that “parents and teachers should be educated on other mechanisms to prevent and combat bullying. In the first instance, the mechanisms established in the school must be activated. And second, if such measures are not working, legal action must be resorted to: civil or criminal, depending on the case.”

Molina believes that even though cases have increased over the years, this does not mean that this conduct should be criminalized: “Ideally, schools and families should have educational methods and programs in place to avoid such cases or that, in the event of their occurrence, an effective solution is provided; when a situation of bullying is brought to court, the conflict may take years to resolve and revictimization may occur in minors”.

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