Is the electronic class register mandatory? No, the law says so
The electronic class register is not mandatory and cannot even be imposed. Here because. The intervention of Francesco Provinciali, former MIUR inspection manager and honorary judge of the Milan Juvenile Court
It is not true that the actions that are performed, the behaviors that are implemented and what is used out of mere consolidated and even prevailing habit is or could become obligatory in practice: as they say in legal terms "custom can never operate against the law ".
In many scholastic institutes, the school directors have effectively forced teachers to use the electronic register instead of the paper one, in every order and level, from kindergarten to secondary school. The most accredited motivation is the extension – for a sort of transference applied to every institutional context and PA apparatus – of digitization as a way of carrying out office operations, practices, annotations: in short, the replacement of traditional means – pen and paper – with new technologies, to communicate or archive.
A drift that has taken on even paroxysmal tones and implementation methods, applying a general principle to cases in which it would be necessary to exercise the priority use of critical thinking and common sense. Especially when the use of digital is more valuable as a method regardless, without asking whether there is a practical correspondence in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, practicality, confidentiality or transparency of the documents: if the form prevails over the substance, there is the risk of compromising the concreteness for favor an uncritical practice, likely to generate complications rather than the much-vaunted simplification. But dexterity is not reduced to just typing, pressing a key can never replace writing a word, the past is not erased and all the ways in which to express and communicate must be preserved.
The complaints against the electronic register mainly concern its actual usefulness, the time required to compile it, its being a consultable annotation and certification tool.
A school inspector visiting a class would have difficulty, for example in accessing the data: exercising an institutional control function in the interest of the public service, he should be able to have ' ictu oculi ', that is ' de visu ' of all the evaluation elements. The digital archiving of data requires a username and password (not to say the rest) which make it cryptic, deferable and even potentially alterable (here the old saying ' scripta manent ' does not apply).
This is a reductive aspect of a misunderstood school autonomy because school documents must be available for consultation: the quality of the school service is verified through technical control, through administrative channels, but the class register is a public document that pertains to a public service . The jurisprudence is unanimous on this. Moreover, there is – and has not been suppressed – a paper model of class register validated by the Ministry and distributed – with purchase costs – to all schools in the Republic. Sending it to the shredder while waiting for it to be officially replaced by the digital one (if and when there will be) frankly seems like a waste of public money.
It is true that the DL n. 95 of 2012, converted into Law 7 August 2012, n. 135, had introduced the obligation for schools to equip themselves with an electronic register starting from the 2012-2013 school year, providing that the MIUR prepared within sixty days from the date of entry into force of the law converting the decree a plan for the dematerialization of administrative procedures in the field of education, university and research and of relations with the communities of teachers, staff, students and families. However, this plan was never prepared, nullifying the law and making the use of electronic registers and report cards non-compulsory. Furthermore, as unequivocally points out the sentence of the Cassation Section V, Sent., (audit 02-07-2019) 21-11-2019, n. 47241 and it is known that the Cassation Sentences make jurisprudence up to different legislation.
Add to this the two Judgments of the Labor Judge of the Court of Catania of 8/9/2020 according to which the provisions of the aforementioned DL 95/2012 on the electronic register assumed a purely programmatic value, since there was no subsequent implementing regulation. Finally, the President of the same Labor Section of the Court of Catania on 2/12/2020 canceled the disciplinary sanction imposed by a School Manager on some teachers who had refused to use the electronic register. Since metaphors such as those of the 'sheriff principal' or 'ship captain' have been accredited thanks to the intuitions of a policy that favors special effects, a para-military declination of school organization has been passing. Until it is made mandatory, the digital class register is only experimental and a resolution of the teaching staff is not enough to impose it, much less that someone can say "it is used because I say so".
Sic stantibus rebus , therefore, the type of register to be used must meet the criteria of utility, practicality, certainty of the compilation methods and remains – until proven otherwise – a tool for use by the teacher that falls within the broader container of freedom of 'teaching: which is indefectibly and by jurisprudence freedom of method.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/il-registro-elettronico-di-classe-e-obbligatorio-no-lo-dice-la-legge/ on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 06:55:33 +0000.