“We want less crowded classes. I don’t like the so-called chicken coop classes at all, we don’t tolerate them anymore“. (Giuseppe Conte, 26 June 2020)
So Prime Minister Conte declared in June, on the days of presentation of the guidelines of the School Plan 2020-21. Abused formulation, to effect, for the vilification of the Public School perpetrated for years and for which, to be honest, the current executive has no direct responsibility.
Let’s go to the Piano. Anyone who wants to read it, also because it is a document of less than twenty pages, will find it published everywhere. However, the final form will only be available on August 31st, that is the day before the official start of the 2020-21 school year.
Without, therefore, going into details, the improvisation, the blame game, the pretentiousness of having a full cake and a drunk wife immediately catch the eye.
By reading the guidelines, for example, ample autonomy is granted to individual schools for which no fixed rule but the burden on school managers to adapt these guidelines to the reality in which they find themselves working.
In the case of particular forms of disability, referring precisely to disabled pupils, we go “to reasonable accommodation”. Reasonableness, gentlemen. Adaptability. Getting by.
Clearly, the knots emerged immediately and, now, which is the time to materialize, at a fiat since September, they have come to a head.
First of all, how many real funds have been allocated to the School? The Azzolina, in June, claimed to have asked for a billion more than the one waved at the press conference with Conte, stressing that it was not she who decided money, but the Ministry of Economy led by Gualtieri. In the days when there were tales of four billion, considered insufficient by the unions, the minister was missing some truth.
In the dance of the numbers, of real billions, presumed, announced, appeared, reappeared in the tangle of the Dpcm, of launching and relaunching an Italy already distracted by holidays and the heat wave, in the boot schools there was no one, say one, chiseling of “factory” to adapt the classrooms to the safety trumpeted in all the sauces from the top.
Those who “came from the dead”, that is the people who work there in the schools, gave eyewitness testimony of sporadic inspections by the employees of the bodies, of funds not received and of a sovereign flat calm. Something has moved, only on 14 August with Legislative Decree No. 104 (Relaunch Decree 2) which allocates 85 million euros for last year for light building interventions.
The minister, meanwhile, in the month of July, went up and down the peninsula taking part in round tables, in concert with local authorities and school managers to get a detailed picture of the situation. A picture, without a doubt, complex, inhomogeneous, difficult. After all, the minister was aware of the chicken coop classes, not from the moon!
How and where to find classrooms for at least 15% of pupils, approximately one million, beyond the measure of the buccal meter? A software had calculated it. But in August, that is today, the number of children to be placed in parks, museums, cinemas, theaters, parishes, in tensile structures, libraries, has miraculously dropped.
A certainty in the confusion: the classrooms of Italian schools cannot all be adequate for social security distancing. You can’t fix old gashes with patches. So? The discovery of dry pasta. Surplus pupils will stay at home in rotation, resorting to Dad, masks. All the rest will have to be invented by managers, contacts, teachers and Ata. Let’s leave out the serological tests for teachers, foreseeable stops due to infections, quarantines, new hires, staff training, timetables, transport, working parents …
Are these the conditions for doing school safely?
A few months have passed since the lockdown period. It would be unacceptable and very serious, to find ourselves with closed schools, with our children at home and the DDA again. Meanwhile, as we write, the number of infected people is rising sharply.
We have been in seclusion accepting sacrifices and renunciations for the sake of ourselves, of others, of the country. All thwarted? Something is not right, it is not right. Absolutely.
Is it legitimate, in light of what is happening, to have strong doubts about the guidelines of the School Plan approved on June 26 and to doubt about the dates for returning to school?
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The concern is very strong. This is not any preconceived criticism of the government. There are facts, data, timelines that speak for themselves. Minister Azzolina minimizes, dispensing smiles and declaring herself confident for the excellent work done so far. But the problems are many, heavy and big as boulders. We, in the school, know this.
What else to say? Nothing. September, month of the arduous sentence.
Enza Sirianni
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