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The school year has started and the lessons, with the exception of some individual cases, are resumed everywhere. This is the good news after the months of lockdown.
The bad news is that the problems of these first weeks of school overlap, causing confusion and disorientation in many cases.
Especially in regards to staff, the problems at the beginning of the school year are not only the same as in previous years (the empty chairs) but I got an update (the gps chaos) which has made an already complicated situation very heavy. And then there is the question of competitions, arriving from October with the extraordinary procedure.
We talk about it with Maddalena gissi, general secretary of the Cisl School.
The chaos of the substitutes is putting pressure on several territories. Many argue that GPS and the new system could have been postponed for another time. Do you believe it too?
When it became clear that the closing of the schools would last until June, our first concern was to imagine what were the conditions that would be guaranteed to start the new year with presence and safety. Together with the adequate spaces and the availability of anti-contagion materials and devices, having all the necessary personnel immediately in service was indicated by us as an absolutely priority need. Taking this into account, among other things, our requests to stabilize the work of temporary workers as much as possible, with particular attention to support positions, but we had also proposed to postpone the renewal of the classifications for one year. Politics has made different decisions, as is known, both in hiring and in the renewal of rankings. And then there was the management of those options, which emphasized their limits and risks. Once it was decided that the renovation would take place, procedures and timing needed to be managed more prudently. When it comes to hiring, the number of job openings speaks for itself. In GPS, the confusion that still reigns today speaks clearly. I can say that the CISL Scuola, with the extraordinary commitment that its territorial structures lavish, has made an enormous contribution by supporting the applicants in the compilation of the applications, struggling with a computer system often hay.
The competitions should start in October, they confirmed to the Ministry. The opposition forces and many precarious workers ask for the postponement of the procedures. In your opinion, is this a viable option?
I reiterate that the subject must be absolutely summarized and discussed outside of ideological schematics, but with wisdom and a sense of reality, to reconcile two needs that must be considered: opening the doors of schools to young graduates and enhancing the experience accumulated by those with their precarious job allow the school to function well. In the immediate future, I believe that the decision to postpone competition tests or to take them should be taken with great responsibility in the face of a trend of contagion that requires the utmost caution. The spread of the infection among students and the preventive quarantine that is provided to teachers are factors to take into account since it is a competence that requires presence in premises whose conditions have not yet been certified by health managers. In any case, avoid making this problem a matter of image or political controversy, choose wisely and prudently.
In these first weeks of school, one of the problems is represented by fragile workers. The minister said there should be no more than 300. But is that so? Has the CISL Scuola estimated how many fragile school workers there are?
We understand that there may be two or three cases, on average, in each school. We have more than 8,000 in Italy, he counts. Unfortunately, the figures are much higher than those declared by the minister.
However, I would like to clarify that the situation of the fragile cannot be automatically counted among the conditions of inadequacy, as foreseen in the circular of a few days ago; We request to distinguish the requests of the personnel that rely on the certifications of the general practitioners and the competent physician from the other instances. The vulnerability of colleagues is related to the pandemic condition and should be treated as such. Using the contract that regulates inappropriateness seems appropriate to us but it is not exhaustive enough. We need a serious discussion and a discussion table to verify the cases and assess the scope and possible alternative solutions to solve the problem.
How is the reopening of schools going: give us a grade from 1 to 10 and explain the reasons
I want to give a 7 that first of all expresses the joy of returning to the condition that I consider “natural” for the school, essential for the educational relationship to develop fully. A relationship that is not only that between teachers and students, but that which encourages relationships between all components of the school community. Certainly the grade would have been higher, this grade, if it had been able to ignore the deficiencies and delays that the schools, through no fault of their own, had to pay for. The backlog of desks, staff appointments, and many other issues that were considered resolved in words, if not offset by the items I mentioned first, would have made that vote largely insufficient.
Let’s talk about the new contract: at the moment everything is stopped. What are the priorities for the contract renewal of school workers?
I mention only two of them, even if the issue in recent months has been forcibly overshadowed by the eruption of many other emergencies and priorities. In the new contract, we will have to reconsider, or consider from scratch, forms of work, such as distance education and smart work, that have broken into the school world with the pandemic or have found an absolutely unprecedented spread. The second issue, which cannot be avoided, is the improvement of all professional skills, in the direction of a rebalancing with the rest of Europe that everyone recognizes the need, but that cannot be achieved only with good words. It must be supported by making the necessary resources available. We hope that the political parties that contested the signing of the last contract, given their valuations that then spoke of “insignificant amount of the increase achieved”, are now ready to support a great battle in favor of a truly substantial financing, capable of recovering the structural delays of our educational system with the resources of the Recovery Fund but also to ensure, when fully operational, new salary and career elements useful to recover a historical gap in the Italian school.
