Dados públicos sobre altas habilidades ou superdotação em sites de secretarias de educação

Abstract

Law No. 12,527/2011 (Access to Information Law, LAI) assigns public agencies the duty to provide, in order to ensure the right of all, access to information of particular, collective, or general interest provided within the time frame established by law and, under penalty of liability with the exception of information whose confidentiality is essential to get society and the State safe. The growing use of digitization, especially through the internet, it is expected that essential information are available. With this in mind, gifted students are part of Special Education and are entitled to identification and care guaranteed by Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional. Thus, this research aims to verify whether there is access to educational information and legal documents related to gifted students on the websites of the Departments of Education of the municipalities of São Carlos Region Education Board, located in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Specific objectives include: a) Identifying what data regarding gifted students and official documents are available on the websites surveyed; b) Investigating whether there are any initiatives for providing specialized educational services to those students advertised on the portals; c) Verifying whether the “Contact Us” services of the websites are responding to the information requested or if they are not found accessible on the portals; and d) Informing the Departments of Education if the required information is inaccessible. The research is Exploratory and Documentary. The municipalities covered by the Board of Education are: Corumbataí, Descalvado, Dourado, Ibaté, Itirapina, Ribeirão Bonito, and São Carlos. The results obtained are: i) only the municipality of Descalvado has specific legislation aimed to gifted students while the others ones deal with the topic of the documents that mention Special Education in a generic way; ii) no specific actions or programs aimed at providing specialized educational services to this population were identified; iii) regarding passive transparency, only Descalvado, Ibaté, and São Carlos responded to requests via E-SIC; iv) attempts to contact municipalities by email and telephone proved ineffective; and e) the lack of transparency among municipalities belonging to the São Carlos Education Board highlights the need to comply with the LAI, and it can be inferred, the further research may include other municipalities. As a result of these findings, the education departaments inaccessible will be notified of the results.