School, in Genoa, children on their knees use chairs as desks

Primary school children on their knees using chairs as writing desks, or with the notebook on their bent knees to draw or sitting on the floor. The photo of the children taken by some parents has gone viral on the web. This was the first day of a Genoese high school in the Castelletto district, Maria Mazzini, which has not yet received all the single-seater desks designed for the post-Covid school (some 15,000 single-seater or wheeled desks are still waiting to be delivered). The situation angered many parents who later gathered under the school entrance to decide how to move and then send a letter to the regional director of the school, who will also have to face the “case” of the Caffaro school in via Certosa, which arose. later, after the Mazzini situation ended on the web.

The Maria Mazzini school welcomes hundreds of children. Based on what we learned, the new banks should arrive in the next few years, at least part of those that had been requested. “Dear Azzolina, these are the students of a Genoese class, who write on their knees because they do not have the desks you promised. And they would not be the only ones, unfortunately,” is the complaint on Facebook by the president of the Liguria Region, Giovanni Toti. Our children, teachers and families do not deserve this treatment, especially after the sacrifices made in recent months in which it was also a moral duty to work to avoid all this. I – Toti says – I find it unacceptable and I am already writing a letter. to the school administration to intervene immediately. An image like this is not worthy of a civilized country like Italy ”.

“It is unacceptable that, despite the months of preparation to return to school, the children of Liguria today have been forced, in the absence of desks, to write on their knees,” says Raffaella Paita, MP for Italia Viva. “We believed that the long and complicated preparation and above all the repeated assurances of Minister Azzolina about an orderly resumption of the lessons were enough. Unfortunately, we were wrong. school that sees its educational function compromised ”, he concludes.

The director of Maria Mazzini, Renzo Ronconi, does not hide his anger at what happened. “It was a great lightness of a teacher: she wanted to highlight the work done by the children on the first day of school despite the many difficulties, but she sent it to the mothers, who made instrumental use of it. It is shameful to use children for their own purposes, also because how many times it is understood to see students, for example at the Ducale, while they draw sitting on the floor ”. But that is not a school … “It is true, but it is also true that we are missing several desks, both those acquired by us and those that will come from the ministry. For tomorrow, we hope, they begin to deliver them ”.

In the evening, the director, to try to explain what happened, relied on a press release requested by the regional school management. “The school that I have been managing since September 1 has done a great job in the summer months to organize the reopening. Like many other schools, it has faced the difficulties of the last days with a constructive and collaborative spirit: among these difficulties, the delays in the delivery of the desks, ordered well in advance, will arrive tomorrow afternoon and the first day of classes, which It was festive, we just avoided putting the old ones back on. The photo shows children who, during an educational activity, are drawing serenely in an environment of freedom: naivety, on the part of the teacher, to make it work, but wrong and serious exploiting it, exploiting it, especially children, on a day in the that we had only found great enthusiasm and no criticism. In my school I found trained and motivated teachers, whom I defend, children smiling and happy to go back to school, that is the image that I carry in my heart from this first day. rno and that I want to stay with families and teachers. “