For weeks the school buildings remain almost empty and could become ordinary maintenance sites, from classrooms to bathrooms, from fixtures to laboratories. Instead, between restricted funds, divided skills and jobs that start late, every September we often start again with the same problems
Every year, when the last bell rings at the beginning of June, Italy finds itself for weeks with thousands of almost empty school buildings, therefore theoretically available for everything that appears complicated or impossible during the year: fixing bathrooms, repairing fixtures, painting walls, renovating laboratories, fixing the systems, making gyms and courtyards usable, replacing worn-out furnishings and tackling that minute maintenance which, precisely because it does not produce inaugurations or photographs with the tricolor ribbon, often ends up on the margins of public priorities. Something is being done, let’s be clear, but in September to notice the improvements you need to have trained with the puzzle week to find the differences between one image and another. The school in the summer, it must be said immediately, is not closed: the secretariats manage registrations, transfers, rankings, contracts, certificates, diplomas, projects and personnel practices; ATA staff supervise, clean, move, prepare, open and close; school directors and various managers plan staffing, form sections, set deadlines, manage family requests and other bureaucratic matters; some of the teachers remain busy until the first days of July with exams, final exams, make-ups, deferred assessments and end-of-year obligations, while another, having completed their June obligations, goes through a long suspension from the most obvious school, that of classroom lessons. The fact is that the material time to intervene on buildings would exist, because the summer offers a window that no other public service has with the same breadth, but this time is often wasted between delays, fragmented skills, tied resources, tenders started late, understaffed technical offices and responsibilities distributed in such a way as to make every decision slower than the need it should satisfy. The Ecosystem School 2025 report by Legambiente returns the image of fragile, unequal and intermittent school maintenance, in which the distance between what would be necessary and what is actually achieved remains wide, especially when we move from programmatic declarations to the concrete ability to spend, contract and close the works before students return to the classroom. Ordinary maintenance, which should prevent buildings from slowly deteriorating, often appears compressed into modest budgets, while extraordinary maintenance, even when it is financed, encounters times and procedures that rarely coincide with the school calendar.
The point, therefore, cannot be reduced to the formula according to which there is a lack of funds, because in many cases the resources exist, arrive through different channels and respond to specific objectives, from digital to Pnrr, from safety to efficiency. The problem is that this money is not always what is needed at the time it is needed, it cannot always be used for the concrete intervention that a building requires, it does not always arrive together with ready-made projects, sufficient technical staff, rapid procedures and a clear responsibility on who must do what by September. Thus it happens that a school can receive funds for innovative environments and continue to have windows that close poorly, can be equipped with digital blackboards affixed to peeling and dirty walls, while the bathrooms remain in mediocre, or even terrible, conditions. It is the all-Italian distance between inauguration intervention and small maintenance. What makes the picture more complicated is the structure of school governance itself, because even when the manager knows the problems of the building, he collects the consequences when something doesn’t work and responds to families, students and staff, without however being the true owner nor the final decision maker on building interventions. The buildings depend on local authorities, with the Municipalities responsible for childhood, primary and middle schools and Provinces or metropolitan cities for high schools; the school reports, the body evaluates, the technical office programs, the policy allocates, the tender starts, the company executes and, while it seems to have ended up in the famous Don Raffaè by Bubola-De André, a weak link in this chain is enough for the summer to pass faster than the construction site. The real question, then, does not only concern what principals, teachers, secretaries and ATA staff do when students are at home, since summer school, albeit with different intensities and reduced attendance, continues to function. The issue is what we, as citizens together with our representatives, intend to do with our (yes, our!) schools when there is finally time to take care of them. The reality is that the Italian school continues to oscillate between big plans and small urgencies, between important funding – bandied about, as always – and elementary difficulties, between the ambition of innovative classrooms and the reality of buildings that age faster than they are cared for. Then September arrives, the classrooms fill up, the problems return to the routine and the opportunity closes until the following year. This is how, even in summer, the Italian school has no peace.
