Sagunto education: Compromís accuses PP of blocking Eduardo Merello school revamp
Compromís says the PP-led regional government is "choking public education" in Sagunto: a court ruling blocking the 13.5-million-euro renovation of the Eduardo Merello school means prefab classrooms stay in place.
Compromís (a Valencian left-wing party) has taken a complaint to the Corts Valencianes, the regional parliament, against the Education department, which is run by the PP (the conservative Popular Party). Compromís accuses it of "choking public education" in Sagunto and of condemning the town "to the return of the barracones", temporary prefab classrooms, calling it "irresponsible and unacceptable". The complaint lands on a conflict the city has been dragging along for years: a shortage of school places and stalled building works that were meant to fix it.
The complaint centres on the CIPFP Eduardo Merello, a vocational school in Puerto de Sagunto (the coastal district) whose full renovation has been stuck for three years in a legal battle. According to a report by elperiodic.com on 21 September, a week before this latest complaint, Compromís had already said it would bring a motion to October's council plenary asking the regional government to withdraw its appeal against the court ruling that struck down the legal order which had kept the Plan Edificant (the regional school-building programme) investment frozen at the school, as part of a wider claim for more than 20 million euros in education infrastructure for the town. It is precisely that court ruling, and the regional government's appeal against it, that Compromís now points to as the direct reason the prefab classrooms are still standing instead of the permanent facility.
The figure at stake at Eduardo Merello is a specific one: the renovation has been budgeted since July 2023 at 13,583,712 euros through Plan Edificant, to turn the old Escuela de Aprendices (apprentice school) building in Puerto de Sagunto into a leading vocational training centre. The school itself changed status on 26 May 2023, moving from an ordinary secondary school to an integrated vocational centre under Order 1/2023, published in the DOGV (the regional official gazette), which made Sagunto the only town in the Valencian Community with two such integrated vocational centres. That special status is part of what Compromís cites to argue the works need unblocking urgently.
This is not the first time the lack of school infrastructure in Sagunto has become a public issue. In July 2024, the City Council itself formally complained about the shortage of places: in the previous three years the town had taken in 2,700 new pupils, and some Bachillerato (upper secondary) classes had close to 40 students, a situation the then Education councillor, Raúl Palmero, called "intolerable". Part of that pressure, the Council explained at the time, came from outside the town: the new secondary school in neighbouring Canet d'En Berenguer was built without Bachillerato classrooms, so those pupils ended up being sent to Sagunto's schools, already stretched to their limit.
The stand-off between the City Council and the regional government over school building works is not new either. In May 2025, the regional government had already cancelled three other committed works at schools in the town (CEIP Maestro Tarrazona, Montíber and Baladre, worth 1,144,024, 1,518,942 and 903,909 euros respectively), arguing that tendering or awarding had not happened within a year. The Council said at the time that argument was not reason enough to cancel the projects, in a dispute now repeating itself with Eduardo Merello on a larger scale. Added together, those three cancelled 2025 projects came to around 3.57 million euros, a figure dwarfed by the 13.58 million blocked at Eduardo Merello alone, which helps explain why Compromís describes this as a repeated pattern rather than a one-off.
For families with children in Sagunto's school system, the legal dispute translates into something very concrete: prefab classrooms that were meant to be temporary and that, while the appeal works its way through the courts, have no date for being replaced with the permanent Plan Edificant facility. The school year that has just started at Eduardo Merello is, once again, being taught in the same temporary building that was supposed to stop being used three school years ago. Compromís will formally ask the regional government, at October's plenary, to withdraw the appeal, a step that, if it happened, would allow works blocked since 2023 to restart, worth more than 13.5 million euros at Eduardo Merello alone, as part of a total claim the party puts at more than 20 million euros for the town's school infrastructure overall.
According to elperiodic.com. Additional background: Sagunto City Council.