Who doesn’t want to save the school year?
All the mistakes about the school. The speech by Giovanni Cominelli of the Kuliscioff foundation, former school manager of the PCI-PDS-DS in Lombardy and former member of the Evaluation Working Group set up in 2001 by the then Minister Letizia Moratti
A prediction was very solid since early September 2020: that Covid would not give us respite and that, therefore, it was necessary to commit to securing the 2020-21 school year.
A complicated operation, because school is not a world apart. A boy who goes to school involves the family, from which he moves, the transport with which he moves, the school to which he moves and within, the companions he moves with …
The trouble is that Covid-19 is the clandestine companion of these movements. Instead, the government and Minister Lucia Azzolina had decided that schools were sheltered, on the basis of the data provided by the Technical-Scientific Committee , which artificially isolated the numbers of infections that occurred at school from those that were attributable to other environments.
For Azzolina in October the infections were 0.021% among students and 0.047% among teachers. It is a pity that the environments are mutually permeable. Therefore, schools are not protected from Covid as are bars, cinemas, gyms, buses …
This realistic perception should have guided school safety policies as early as September. The government has drifted between the tearful rhetoric of the "generation lost to education and knowledge" and total practical inertia or the comical-expensive measures of wheeled benches.
So today, February 9, we oscillate between intermittent lessons in the presence, postponements and a precarious DDA, barely tolerated by children and teachers.
All within the framework of a clash-competition between the Government and the Regions, the stakes of which are: "Who is left with the match of the unpopularity of decisions?".
The result is that the 2020-21 school year is coming to a sad end.
The damage that this causes for children is described almost every day by research relating to dispersion, educational poverty, the psychological condition of anxiety, uncertainty, loneliness, deconcentration …
What to do?
Attention continues to be focused on transport policy, in order to dilute the mass of pupils traveling on a greater number of vehicles.
Now, if it has been relatively easy, in urban and metropolitan areas, under public transport, to increase the means and prepare new personnel, this is not the case in the great Italian province, where transport is mainly private, albeit copiously subsidized by the State or by the Regions.
In the meantime, the school managers, in recent months, have worked hard to counter the crowd of students in schools, recovering often underused spaces, differentiating the access times, between 8.00 and 10.00, or alternating the days: today half students in attendance , the other half in DaD, tomorrow vice versa.
So far the results are scarce, to the point that the Government and the Regions announce openings / closings, always in fits and starts, in the name of postponement, uncertainty and impotence. It seems he is resigning us.
But yet…
What is the main obstacle to an anti-Covid emergency policy in the school?
Crocodile tears are wept over the lost children, but the stubborn refusal to change the rigid organization of work and teaching of the Italian school system resists.
While the productive system, that of commerce, that of personal services – health in the first place – have taken note of the extraordinary and dramatic emergency in progress and have painstakingly sketched out strategies for change, the public administrative system and, in particular, that of education they are immobile.
A decisive cause is the role of trade unions, which exercise powerful negative governance, systematically using the power of veto, which politics has attributed to them.
Thus, for example, they have opposed and resist the DDA, considering net-working a way of working unrelated to the contract and therefore subject to recourse to the praetor of labor and the TAR.
In fact, the National Contract signed on April 19, 2018 did not provide for the DaD!
So they oppose double shifts!
What would it take during this school year to promote devolution in schools and on means of transport?
First, reshape the calendar for the entire year, of which nearly half is now almost lost.
A staggering of times should be adopted as is practiced in many European countries: extend the Easter holidays and extend the year until the third to last week of July.
It's hot? They have long invented air conditioning and related appliances to produce it. Do the kids have to work in the fields? Not anymore!
Starting from the 2021-22 school year, the service should resume after 20 August and the start of classes on 1 September. And then: week-long holidays from November 1st and Christmas holidays as usual until after Epiphany and long holidays at Easter. And the end of the school year at the end of July.
Secondly, in this extraordinary phase, double shifts are needed, in two ways: either half boys in attendance and the other half in DaD. Or, since DDA is considered to be the bilge of all the psychic ills of children, then do double shifts in the presence, as in the old days: half enter in the morning, half enter in the afternoon.
They are necessary if you really want to achieve two purposes: to make up for lost school time and to dilute the concentration of attendance at school.
And if there are no canteens, in the High and Middle Schools? It is not necessary to build canteens: just use the service already used for elementary schools, which also have canteens, but which, due to Covid, they cannot use: children eat in class, on their desks, the meals provided by external services or internally, in special containers, perfectly sanitized.
For this school year, exceptionally, it will also be necessary to use Saturdays.
Impossible feat? It would not seem.
Except that many teaching colleges must, at least for this year, stop worshiping the golden calf of the timetable cheerfully packaged on 1 September 2020 as if Covid was already behind us. As for the unions, which effectively control the Administration, it is up to the government to assume its responsibilities and nail them to theirs.
It is not tolerable that the State is unable to put its personnel at the service of citizens, families and students. While in the manufacturing, trade, services and healthcare sectors, staff jump through hoops to keep businesses going, the government lacks the courage and strength to bend the corporate and selfish tendencies of the unions to save a school year. already very compromised. As for personnel, it has always been distributed along the more or less regular Gaussian curve: a “heroic” share, an oscillating center, a “washing” minority.
The heroic share – difficult to quantify on around 800,000 teachers – went to work in the DOD, effectively doubling the hours of commitment and work, at an unchanged salary.
In any case, if the pupils lose the school year, it is the government parties and the trade unions that must be held responsible.
And it is to the Government, the Minister of Education and the trade unions that students and their parents, who camp out in the cold, computer in hand, in front of the closed schools, would do well to ask if they really intend to save the school year.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/chi-non-vuole-salvare-anno-scolastico/ on Tue, 09 Feb 2021 09:48:16 +0000.