The situation of school buildings in Italy is dramatic. This is
demonstrated by the daily experience of those who study and work in
schools, but it is also reported by official data, which cannot hide
this evident reality. According to what is written in the report
"Ecosistema scuola 2024", one school in three has serious safety
problems that concern structural issues: electrical systems, attics,
missing certificates of habitability. A situation that also reiterates
the gap that exists at a territorial level, since if in the North the
situation is a little better, in the South only 22.6% of schools have
the certificate of habitability. Let's remember that when we talk about
certificates of habitability we are mainly referring to fire and
earthquake resistance: we are therefore not just talking about peeling
walls or walls to be repainted, elements that would also be important,
but of issues of much greater importance for safety. So let's give some
other more specific official parameters.
At the national level, 57.68% of school buildings do not have a fire
prevention certificate and 41.50% do not have a static test. It should
be noted, regarding this last figure, that almost half of Italian
schools are located in seismic zones 1 and 2.
English: Between September 2023 and September 2024, 69 episodes of
collapses in school buildings were recorded, reaching the highest peak
in the last seven years. Obviously, these are important events, such as
to be recorded and disclosed in official statistics. It should not be
forgotten that schools, squeezed by the blackmail of the enrollment cap
to be reached to maintain teaching and administrative autonomy,
sometimes hide the various problems to boast of safety and efficiency
that often do not exist. The official data on collapses therefore, like
those relating to the many occasional problems that unfortunately are
the daily norm, such as flooding, infiltrations, fixtures, short
circuits etc. correspond exclusively to what is declared, and probably
represent a number lower than the reality of the facts. In a general
framework of serious structural inadequacy, both extraordinary
interventions, in charge of local authorities - municipalities for
primary and middle schools, provinces for high schools - and
extraordinary interventions, are very lacking. Not to mention real
building investments and construction of new school buildings: here we
are in total fog! Yet there has been no shortage of opportunities and
resources either. During the Covid period, the needs of safety and
distancing had led to calls for adequate building plans for the
resumption of in-person teaching activities and in general for the
future. Despite all this, the gigantic PNRR resources that intervened in
the post-Covid situation have been and still are a gigantic mockery and
an opportunity to dissipate existing resources, aimed exclusively at
what is just big business. Very few resources have been allocated to
construction, redevelopment and compliance of schools, as well as to the
construction of new buildings. Those few have then been further reduced
due to the increases in the cost of building materials. We are thus
faced with a paradoxical situation in which rivers of money have been
reserved for learning environments, understood as furnishings and
digital environments, while very little has gone to finance the needs of
physical and real environments that remain dilapidated.
The latest mockery, in chronological order, is represented by the
"Didacta 2025" edition, a national mega-event organized by the Ministry
of Education and Merit in this very month of March as part of the "PNRR
Interventions for School Buildings". But there is not even a shadow of
concrete and bricks. Courses, seminars, development of guidelines for
the management of new digital and educational environments, agreements
with the Civil Protection for campuses and training interventions that
transform students into "ambassadors of the culture of risk" and that
give teachers a "spatial competence" to better organize teaching spaces.
Any comment is superfluous.
Meanwhile, school buildings are left in a state of decay and lack of
safety is daily bread. But there are those who do not resign themselves
to this situation and fight for the real safety of study and work
environments, the physical and concrete ones. Students, school workers,
parents do it.
Below is an interview with Andrea, a parent of the Micheli Lamarmora
schools in Livorno, where a protest is taking place that has become a
real citizen dispute due to its systematicity and continuity of intervention
Q: What are the problems with the school structure your children attend?
A: The problems certainly did not arise today. The Micheli-Lamarmora
schools are located in Piazza XI Maggio, in a working-class neighborhood
of Livorno, and have always been housed in a very large and historic
building, built in the late 1800s, with the second floor built in the
early decades of the 1900s. A structure that, as is logical, has
suffered from the "aches and pains" due to time. The consistent
infiltration of rainwater, present since 1990, led in 2019 to the
collapse of the floors in 5 spaces on the second floor, including
classrooms, canteens and bathrooms. At the time, the institutional
intervention got away with it by closing the unsafe areas and promising
work soon. The neglect only worsened the problems that progressively
occurred: crumbling of floors, detachment of pieces of plaster inside
and outside the building, wooden boards of the stone barrier that fell
from a height of 20, 30 meters (the stone barrier was a fixed
scaffolding placed under the roof cornice and served as a protection
tool from possible falls of parts of the roof, only to later become a
source of danger itself). All things that we parents verified without
having official information. We therefore decided to take action, given
the immobility of the municipal and school leaders, and created the
nucleus of the Micheli-Lamarmora parents group. With our now historic
banner "children are the future, let's keep them safe", which has
accompanied us even in the most recent mobilizations, we organized
pickets under the Municipality of Livorno, taking our protest to the
square and making it known to the citizens. Our dispute was accompanied
by a complaint sent to the Livorno Public Prosecutor's Office and to the
Fire Department in which we promptly reported the critical events of the
structure. The complaint was shamefully rejected by the Prosecutor's
Office for a formal issue, but was taken in charge by the Fire
Department who carried out an investigation which revealed that the
building was habitable as long as work began, which finally led the
Municipality to take action. It was 2019. It was a triumph for us, a
victory born of our determination which in that case too was accused of
everything: of having defamed the school, of having created unnecessary
alarmism, even of having made reports outside our competences! The truth
is that the decisive method to move things forward, as always, was the
bottom-up method, the one we have followed even now.
Q: Let's come to the most recent period. Explain the problems related to
the current phase
A: In February 2023, the school building was closed for anti-seismic
modernization works related to the allocation of almost 4 million euros.
The project for temporary prefabricated modules in which to place the
classes in the park of the Lorraine walls was therefore launched.
Parents were involved, taken to visit the area and the modular
structures. The inspections were satisfactory, considering the temporary
nature of the situation, but immediately after the placement of the
classes in the modules, problems emerged: in addition to the lack of
furnishings, heating problems and problems of strong noise, as the
dividers between the classrooms are not equipped with soundproofing
material. A general discomfort with repercussions on teaching that we
immediately denounced, together with the teachers, but that the school
management, as usual, minimized, also resorting to threats towards the
teachers themselves. To these problems, with the arrival of the rain,
infiltrations and humidity were added.
Q: So what actions have you taken?
A: The water infiltrations in the modules have become increasingly
consistent with the bad weather, without the occasional repair work
being effective, thus demonstrating the inadequacy of the structures,
which had been planned and not set up improvised for an unforeseen
emergency. For months we had been making reports, clashing with the
senseless obstinacy of the municipal administration of Livorno in not
wanting to transfer the students to safe and dignified structures. The
Municipality of Livorno should have operated differently, without us
parents mobilizing, but evidently political dynamics unknown to us have
determined an unsustainable stalemate situation, in fact dangerous and
unhealthy for our children and also for the school staff.
Faced with such a paradoxical situation, we began to react. We therefore
reorganized ourselves as parents, taking advantage of the connection
network we had since 2019. The working group composed of class
representatives and the parent representative on the Institute Council
formed a delegation that went to the Municipality for the first time at
the beginning of February to strongly highlight the infiltration
problems present in the modules. Subsequently, we started a collection
of parents' signatures, which had a huge turnout, all this while we
continued to push for remedial work to be done in the modules.
Q: What responses did you receive?
A: The responses to our reports have always been aimed at trivializing
our complaints and accusing us of useless alarmism. The same old story
was always going around: school is safe, everything is under control,
etc. This behavior is therefore denial of reality and, from a certain
point of view, disturbing, if you consider that we are talking about
small children and that some of them are disabled.
Q: How did your protest materialize?
A: Despite the interventions on the modules, which we finally managed to
obtain after much pressure and an objective intensification of the
problems, heavy rain occurred that further flooded classrooms,
corridors, the gym and bathrooms. On February 24th we therefore made the
first call to the Fire Department, who closed off two classrooms in the
primary school (the water was going directly onto the drains and
switches). Even in this case the Municipality did not make concrete
decisions on what to do, relying on the fact that the fire department
had defined the structures as not subject to collapse. As if safety
prevention was based exclusively on the lack of collapses. Following
what happened and the lack of resolving interventions, on February 28th
we therefore went on strike, with a participation of almost 90%. The
children did not enter the school, they did not participate in the
lesson, and a very popular demonstration was held outside the building
with banners and the presence of the press, which gave great prominence
to our initiative.
Subsequently, on March 12, following another storm, the spaces of the
modules were flooded again, even more than the previous times. New call
to the Fire Department who closed three classrooms of the primary
school, the gym and three classrooms of the kindergarten. In this case,
the Municipality could no longer pretend nothing had happened and
transferred the classes of the Lamarmora nursery school to the Volano
school in the Corea neighborhood, leaving the boys and girls of the
primary school in the quagmire of the modules. A decision unacceptable
for us that triggered the second strike on March 13 (also in this case
90% participation) and the demonstration under the Municipality of
Livorno. We were immediately received in the council chamber. A
memorable and beautiful moment for all of us, including parents,
daughters and sons. We filled the room! After the "friendly
institutional" words we moved on to the facts, accusing the municipal
interest in the flooding of schools of culpable delay. The indignation
and anger, already high, increased when - after our intervention - the
institutional figures insisted on defining the school as safe, stating
that the primary school would not be transferred on the pretext that the
primary school students were too numerous. We were not discouraged and
together with our children we chanted "we want to be transferred!" in
front of the representatives of the decision-making bodies and the press
that recorded everything. They did not succeed in making us invisible.
And in the end we managed to obtain the transfer
Q: So in the end there was recognition of the problem by the municipal
administration?
A: In reality, only thanks to the uproar we caused were they forced to
fully acknowledge the problem, also arranging for the transfer of the
primary school classes. And this is evidently what the managers are most
concerned about. On March 14, the school management communicated to us
in a laconic manner and without even minimally recognizing our
commitment: "given the weather conditions and considering that there is
work in progress by the Interguest company that is encountering
obstacles due to adverse weather conditions, we would like to inform you
that the temporary transfer of the classes to other school locations
starting from Monday, March 17 has been agreed with the Municipal
Administration, starting from Monday, March 17 (...) we also assure you
that the company is working and will continue to work until the critical
issues related to the infiltrations are resolved, for which we hope for
a quick return to our headquarters in Via Villa Glori." They wanted to
take advantage of the orange alert to ignore the real reasons that led
to the transfer. But we know well that it was our struggle, our
determination as parents but also as citizens, that moved the
decision-making element into the hands of common sense. Which should
always happen.
Q: How do you intend to proceed?
A: We will continue to closely follow both the module issue and the work
in the historic site in Piazza XI Maggio. The behavior of the municipal
administration and the school management leaves no room for trust worthy
of the name. The transfer, for example, is already calling for our new
positions on the school bus service, which they want to guarantee only
for preschool but not for primary school. Our level of attention is
therefore maximum. We will not give even a millimeter when it comes to
the rights of our daughters and sons. Finally, we hope that our fight
but also the cohesion and method that is distinguishing us will be
followed by other school entities. A story, ours, which, among other
things, shows how the institutional element does not represent the
adequate management model of society, especially when things get difficult.
Andrea Paolini and Patrizia Nesti
https://umanitanova.org/edilizia-scolastica-ordinario-abbandono-e-lotte-dal-basso/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
demonstrated by the daily experience of those who study and work in
schools, but it is also reported by official data, which cannot hide
this evident reality. According to what is written in the report
"Ecosistema scuola 2024", one school in three has serious safety
problems that concern structural issues: electrical systems, attics,
missing certificates of habitability. A situation that also reiterates
the gap that exists at a territorial level, since if in the North the
situation is a little better, in the South only 22.6% of schools have
the certificate of habitability. Let's remember that when we talk about
certificates of habitability we are mainly referring to fire and
earthquake resistance: we are therefore not just talking about peeling
walls or walls to be repainted, elements that would also be important,
but of issues of much greater importance for safety. So let's give some
other more specific official parameters.
At the national level, 57.68% of school buildings do not have a fire
prevention certificate and 41.50% do not have a static test. It should
be noted, regarding this last figure, that almost half of Italian
schools are located in seismic zones 1 and 2.
English: Between September 2023 and September 2024, 69 episodes of
collapses in school buildings were recorded, reaching the highest peak
in the last seven years. Obviously, these are important events, such as
to be recorded and disclosed in official statistics. It should not be
forgotten that schools, squeezed by the blackmail of the enrollment cap
to be reached to maintain teaching and administrative autonomy,
sometimes hide the various problems to boast of safety and efficiency
that often do not exist. The official data on collapses therefore, like
those relating to the many occasional problems that unfortunately are
the daily norm, such as flooding, infiltrations, fixtures, short
circuits etc. correspond exclusively to what is declared, and probably
represent a number lower than the reality of the facts. In a general
framework of serious structural inadequacy, both extraordinary
interventions, in charge of local authorities - municipalities for
primary and middle schools, provinces for high schools - and
extraordinary interventions, are very lacking. Not to mention real
building investments and construction of new school buildings: here we
are in total fog! Yet there has been no shortage of opportunities and
resources either. During the Covid period, the needs of safety and
distancing had led to calls for adequate building plans for the
resumption of in-person teaching activities and in general for the
future. Despite all this, the gigantic PNRR resources that intervened in
the post-Covid situation have been and still are a gigantic mockery and
an opportunity to dissipate existing resources, aimed exclusively at
what is just big business. Very few resources have been allocated to
construction, redevelopment and compliance of schools, as well as to the
construction of new buildings. Those few have then been further reduced
due to the increases in the cost of building materials. We are thus
faced with a paradoxical situation in which rivers of money have been
reserved for learning environments, understood as furnishings and
digital environments, while very little has gone to finance the needs of
physical and real environments that remain dilapidated.
The latest mockery, in chronological order, is represented by the
"Didacta 2025" edition, a national mega-event organized by the Ministry
of Education and Merit in this very month of March as part of the "PNRR
Interventions for School Buildings". But there is not even a shadow of
concrete and bricks. Courses, seminars, development of guidelines for
the management of new digital and educational environments, agreements
with the Civil Protection for campuses and training interventions that
transform students into "ambassadors of the culture of risk" and that
give teachers a "spatial competence" to better organize teaching spaces.
Any comment is superfluous.
Meanwhile, school buildings are left in a state of decay and lack of
safety is daily bread. But there are those who do not resign themselves
to this situation and fight for the real safety of study and work
environments, the physical and concrete ones. Students, school workers,
parents do it.
Below is an interview with Andrea, a parent of the Micheli Lamarmora
schools in Livorno, where a protest is taking place that has become a
real citizen dispute due to its systematicity and continuity of intervention
Q: What are the problems with the school structure your children attend?
A: The problems certainly did not arise today. The Micheli-Lamarmora
schools are located in Piazza XI Maggio, in a working-class neighborhood
of Livorno, and have always been housed in a very large and historic
building, built in the late 1800s, with the second floor built in the
early decades of the 1900s. A structure that, as is logical, has
suffered from the "aches and pains" due to time. The consistent
infiltration of rainwater, present since 1990, led in 2019 to the
collapse of the floors in 5 spaces on the second floor, including
classrooms, canteens and bathrooms. At the time, the institutional
intervention got away with it by closing the unsafe areas and promising
work soon. The neglect only worsened the problems that progressively
occurred: crumbling of floors, detachment of pieces of plaster inside
and outside the building, wooden boards of the stone barrier that fell
from a height of 20, 30 meters (the stone barrier was a fixed
scaffolding placed under the roof cornice and served as a protection
tool from possible falls of parts of the roof, only to later become a
source of danger itself). All things that we parents verified without
having official information. We therefore decided to take action, given
the immobility of the municipal and school leaders, and created the
nucleus of the Micheli-Lamarmora parents group. With our now historic
banner "children are the future, let's keep them safe", which has
accompanied us even in the most recent mobilizations, we organized
pickets under the Municipality of Livorno, taking our protest to the
square and making it known to the citizens. Our dispute was accompanied
by a complaint sent to the Livorno Public Prosecutor's Office and to the
Fire Department in which we promptly reported the critical events of the
structure. The complaint was shamefully rejected by the Prosecutor's
Office for a formal issue, but was taken in charge by the Fire
Department who carried out an investigation which revealed that the
building was habitable as long as work began, which finally led the
Municipality to take action. It was 2019. It was a triumph for us, a
victory born of our determination which in that case too was accused of
everything: of having defamed the school, of having created unnecessary
alarmism, even of having made reports outside our competences! The truth
is that the decisive method to move things forward, as always, was the
bottom-up method, the one we have followed even now.
Q: Let's come to the most recent period. Explain the problems related to
the current phase
A: In February 2023, the school building was closed for anti-seismic
modernization works related to the allocation of almost 4 million euros.
The project for temporary prefabricated modules in which to place the
classes in the park of the Lorraine walls was therefore launched.
Parents were involved, taken to visit the area and the modular
structures. The inspections were satisfactory, considering the temporary
nature of the situation, but immediately after the placement of the
classes in the modules, problems emerged: in addition to the lack of
furnishings, heating problems and problems of strong noise, as the
dividers between the classrooms are not equipped with soundproofing
material. A general discomfort with repercussions on teaching that we
immediately denounced, together with the teachers, but that the school
management, as usual, minimized, also resorting to threats towards the
teachers themselves. To these problems, with the arrival of the rain,
infiltrations and humidity were added.
Q: So what actions have you taken?
A: The water infiltrations in the modules have become increasingly
consistent with the bad weather, without the occasional repair work
being effective, thus demonstrating the inadequacy of the structures,
which had been planned and not set up improvised for an unforeseen
emergency. For months we had been making reports, clashing with the
senseless obstinacy of the municipal administration of Livorno in not
wanting to transfer the students to safe and dignified structures. The
Municipality of Livorno should have operated differently, without us
parents mobilizing, but evidently political dynamics unknown to us have
determined an unsustainable stalemate situation, in fact dangerous and
unhealthy for our children and also for the school staff.
Faced with such a paradoxical situation, we began to react. We therefore
reorganized ourselves as parents, taking advantage of the connection
network we had since 2019. The working group composed of class
representatives and the parent representative on the Institute Council
formed a delegation that went to the Municipality for the first time at
the beginning of February to strongly highlight the infiltration
problems present in the modules. Subsequently, we started a collection
of parents' signatures, which had a huge turnout, all this while we
continued to push for remedial work to be done in the modules.
Q: What responses did you receive?
A: The responses to our reports have always been aimed at trivializing
our complaints and accusing us of useless alarmism. The same old story
was always going around: school is safe, everything is under control,
etc. This behavior is therefore denial of reality and, from a certain
point of view, disturbing, if you consider that we are talking about
small children and that some of them are disabled.
Q: How did your protest materialize?
A: Despite the interventions on the modules, which we finally managed to
obtain after much pressure and an objective intensification of the
problems, heavy rain occurred that further flooded classrooms,
corridors, the gym and bathrooms. On February 24th we therefore made the
first call to the Fire Department, who closed off two classrooms in the
primary school (the water was going directly onto the drains and
switches). Even in this case the Municipality did not make concrete
decisions on what to do, relying on the fact that the fire department
had defined the structures as not subject to collapse. As if safety
prevention was based exclusively on the lack of collapses. Following
what happened and the lack of resolving interventions, on February 28th
we therefore went on strike, with a participation of almost 90%. The
children did not enter the school, they did not participate in the
lesson, and a very popular demonstration was held outside the building
with banners and the presence of the press, which gave great prominence
to our initiative.
Subsequently, on March 12, following another storm, the spaces of the
modules were flooded again, even more than the previous times. New call
to the Fire Department who closed three classrooms of the primary
school, the gym and three classrooms of the kindergarten. In this case,
the Municipality could no longer pretend nothing had happened and
transferred the classes of the Lamarmora nursery school to the Volano
school in the Corea neighborhood, leaving the boys and girls of the
primary school in the quagmire of the modules. A decision unacceptable
for us that triggered the second strike on March 13 (also in this case
90% participation) and the demonstration under the Municipality of
Livorno. We were immediately received in the council chamber. A
memorable and beautiful moment for all of us, including parents,
daughters and sons. We filled the room! After the "friendly
institutional" words we moved on to the facts, accusing the municipal
interest in the flooding of schools of culpable delay. The indignation
and anger, already high, increased when - after our intervention - the
institutional figures insisted on defining the school as safe, stating
that the primary school would not be transferred on the pretext that the
primary school students were too numerous. We were not discouraged and
together with our children we chanted "we want to be transferred!" in
front of the representatives of the decision-making bodies and the press
that recorded everything. They did not succeed in making us invisible.
And in the end we managed to obtain the transfer
Q: So in the end there was recognition of the problem by the municipal
administration?
A: In reality, only thanks to the uproar we caused were they forced to
fully acknowledge the problem, also arranging for the transfer of the
primary school classes. And this is evidently what the managers are most
concerned about. On March 14, the school management communicated to us
in a laconic manner and without even minimally recognizing our
commitment: "given the weather conditions and considering that there is
work in progress by the Interguest company that is encountering
obstacles due to adverse weather conditions, we would like to inform you
that the temporary transfer of the classes to other school locations
starting from Monday, March 17 has been agreed with the Municipal
Administration, starting from Monday, March 17 (...) we also assure you
that the company is working and will continue to work until the critical
issues related to the infiltrations are resolved, for which we hope for
a quick return to our headquarters in Via Villa Glori." They wanted to
take advantage of the orange alert to ignore the real reasons that led
to the transfer. But we know well that it was our struggle, our
determination as parents but also as citizens, that moved the
decision-making element into the hands of common sense. Which should
always happen.
Q: How do you intend to proceed?
A: We will continue to closely follow both the module issue and the work
in the historic site in Piazza XI Maggio. The behavior of the municipal
administration and the school management leaves no room for trust worthy
of the name. The transfer, for example, is already calling for our new
positions on the school bus service, which they want to guarantee only
for preschool but not for primary school. Our level of attention is
therefore maximum. We will not give even a millimeter when it comes to
the rights of our daughters and sons. Finally, we hope that our fight
but also the cohesion and method that is distinguishing us will be
followed by other school entities. A story, ours, which, among other
things, shows how the institutional element does not represent the
adequate management model of society, especially when things get difficult.
Andrea Paolini and Patrizia Nesti
https://umanitanova.org/edilizia-scolastica-ordinario-abbandono-e-lotte-dal-basso/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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