WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #5-25: Rejecting the cuts. Educational assistance at school (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 For four months, a fight has been underway in some cities in Tuscany

against cuts to educational assistance for disabled students. Unicobas
has closely followed the situation in Livorno, one of the most serious,
where the reduction in resources has been felt most dramatically. ----
Educational assistance is a service that supports support teachers and
curricular subject teachers in cases of students with particular
seriousness, who need support in the sphere of personal autonomy and
communication. The activity is entrusted to professional educators,
personnel provided by social cooperatives to whom schools contract the
service using regional and state funds that are provided on the
territory through local authorities.

The service, provided for by law 104 of 1992 for cases of particular
seriousness, has had a notable diffusion over time, for various factors.
First of all, it is necessary to consider the increasingly massive
inclusion of disabled students in public schools, even in high schools.
One of the few virtuous practices in this country is in fact that since
1977, it has undertaken a serious process of school integration of
disabilities, closing the phase of differential schools to include,
first in the compulsory age group, then also in high school, children
with any type of disability in mainstream classes. This is no small
feat, if we consider the European panorama. In Italy, 93% of disabled
students attend school in mainstream classes, while in Europe the
"separatist" model is widespread, led by the Czech Republic, Finland,
Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the United Kingdom.
It is true that the Italian model requires investment in personnel
(support teachers and a limited number of students per class), while
instead, as we well know, for years cuts have been the normal way of
managing schools, as well as healthcare and various sectors of social
spending. Over time, therefore, the staff of support teachers has
undergone significant cuts. Currently, at a national level, 50% of
support teachers are made up of temporary staff; there are approximately
120,000 derogation positions, which means that 120,000 positions
corresponding to real needs are part of a fluctuating staff, of an "out
of bag" that from one year to the next can disappear due to spending
reduction needs, and since it is a non-stabilized staff there is not
even the effort of firing people. In this situation, over the years, to
cut support teachers, state personnel, an increasingly widespread use
has been made of educators, outsourced personnel whose cost is
considerably lower.

Now cuts are also being made to educational assistance. In the province
of Livorno, compared to the officially certified needs, 1 million and
200 thousand euros are missing. The service has undergone a drastic
reduction in terms of weekly hours and from March the resources will be
exhausted. The scenario that has opened up is that of a social and
employment emergency.

Disabled students are being hit, deprived of essential support, with
consequences not only on the quality of school inclusion, but also on
the possibility of attendance itself. Educators are being hit, who see
their salaries cut due to the reduction of hours, who are subjected to
exploitative working conditions, often outside the regulation of the
national contract, who work in conditions of extreme daily
precariousness, who have no prospect of continuing work, but the
increasingly concrete spectre of dismissal.

For this reason, since the end of October there have been protest
actions that have seen educators, teachers, disabled students, family
members, associations, student groups in the streets, together with the
grassroots unions. The local institutional responses of the Region,
Province and School Management have been ridiculous, lost in the passing
of responsibilities and in the many bureaucratic technicalities that
only highlight the lack of political will and inadequacy to address and
govern the plan of collective needs. Because education and remuneration
for work are collective needs.

The protest also obviously targets the central government, responsible
for having cut the resources allocated last year by 55%, not adjusting
them to the increase in the number of students requiring educational
assistance. A demonstration of how the protection of the most vulnerable
people is not at all important to those who govern, more interested in
financing wars, major works, large companies and large capital. Schools
and social services are among the sectors most penalized, together with
healthcare, by the reckless choices of those who talk about inclusion
and then systematically proceed to exclusion. This has been well
highlighted in the protests and street demands carried out by
cooperative educators.

The social cooperative sector is one of the most exposed to
precariousness, low pay, working conditions without effective
protection. Public administrations (and not only) use this sector to
manage downwards those services that they are required to provide,
according to the outsourcing system that means paying those who work
less, keeping workers at a de-skilled level even in cases where
individual professional skills are very high, as in the case of
professional educators. In all likelihood the cost of managing tenders,
calls for tenders, reporting and related investigations, entrusted to
administrative staff and officials, is higher than what is derived from
cuts, but the important thing is to maintain the outsourced system, the
underpaid and precarious workers, in short to maintain the hierarchy and
exploitation. And it is instead against this system of hierarchy and
exploitation that these workers have raised their heads and voices,
involving the citizens and making the issue of cuts to educational
assistance a citizen dispute that has gone beyond local limits, forcing
the Ministry of Disabilities itself to confront it. And regardless of
the outcome of this struggle, still ongoing, the mechanism of blackmail,
according to which those who are weaker, more precarious and exploited
must not raise their heads, that mechanism has jammed

E.U.

https://umanitanova.org/respingere-i-tagli-assistenza-educativa-scolastica/
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