Polytan Poligras Platinum GT at the Basque educational center Ikastola Ekintza

Value-Oriented Education

In Spain, Ikastola refers to educational centers where students are taught either entirely or predominantly in the Basque language. These schools are part of the Basque educational system and are located in both the Spanish and French Basque regions. Tens of thousands of schoolchildren in the autonomous Basque community attend such Ikastolas. Basque is considered one of the most challenging languages in the world, partly because it is unrelated to any other known language. Through targeted regional promotion, Basque has experienced a strong revival and is now spoken by approximately 1.2 million people.The self-imposed mission of Ikastola Ekintza in Basque San Sebastian is to provide comprehensive education, from early childhood to high school graduation (bachillerato), in the context of Basque culture and its values, while remaining open to other cultures. Education here is conducted in two languages: Basque and Spanish. The goal is to achieve an optimal balance between knowledge and use of both teaching languages.The Ikastola Ekintza in San Sebastian also offers its students numerous extracurricular activities aligned with its educational goals, focusing on internalizing social values. The school includes several sports facilities, such as courts for paddle tennis and a swimming pool.In spring 2023, we installed our sand-filled synthetic turf system, Poligras Platinum GT, on the school's sports facilities. Primarily developed for hockey stadiums, its main advantage lies in the dense and uniform surface, ensuring ball rolling behavior is not influenced by directional effects, enabling fast and precise hockey play. Thanks to a special texturization process that gives the turf exceptional volume and high resistance, it is also used for multi-sport facilities, including football and other ball sports, as in San Sebastian, where multiple field markings were integrated for versatile use in physical education. Despite its robustness, Poligras is remarkably soft, offering a pleasant playing experience for the students.The additional Polytan CoolPlus feature ensures that the turf does not heat up as quickly or severely under intense sunlight. This ultimately helps reduce water consumption – an increasingly important ecological argument for the use of synthetic turf systems, given the climate change with its hot and extremely dry summers.