Students’ appeal: “The school is already ours; we need to improve it, not occupy it”

“The school is already ours; we need to improve it, not occupy it”, and “if a violent protest or an occupation were to cause damage to the school, we would achieve nothing. In fact, we students would simply end up with even fewer resources and materials”. This is the appeal from a group of students at the ITIS Leonardo da Vinci in Florence, addressed to their fellow pupils. “We are a group of students who, in support of the school’s representatives (both current and future), want to try to improve our school,” they explain, “each of us making our own contribution. We have opened a channel of communication with the headteacher to discuss the reasons behind the protests and put an end to the potentially dangerous acts that have taken place during the demonstrations outside the school in recent days. We do this in the hope that our demands will be met.”

According to the students, “continuing with these protests or even occupying the premises would only lead to damage and destruction. Should an occupation take place, there would be a high risk that people, including those from outside the school, would cause damage to our facilities, our school equipment, and, above all, our laboratories. There are schools, including some similar to ours, that have fewer resources than we do. This does not prevent us from asserting our rights and expressing our dissent. However, this should not be done through an occupation.”

The collective also explains that it wishes to “organise a self-managed event, better than last year’s” and also “a march, starting from the school and joining the demonstration on 30 October: precisely because some of the issues concern our school, whilst others relate to the national management of education”. “Our headteacher has agreed to talk to us,” they add, “to listen to us and to work with us to resolve our problems. In this way, we’ll all be able to organise the self-management better, and sooner.”