Emilia-Romagna 'reopens' primary schools from 31 August

From this year in Emilia-Romagna, to meet the needs of families, schools will 'open' early, offering extracurricular activities from 31 August to 14 September for children aged 6 to 11.

This was announced by the president of the region, Michele de Pascale, and the councillor for schools, Isabella Conti, emphasising that the initiative definitively closes the debate, opened months ago, on changing the school calendar. A hypothesis shelved because, as Conti explained, intervening on compulsory school days 'would have displeased a part of both parents and the school world, in the face of a change on a few days'. Therefore, the councillor added, 'after having questioned ourselves for over a year on this issue heard, we decided to invent a new solution'.

The experimental project, financed for the first year with EUR 3 million in regional resources, targets a potential audience of 100,000 primary school children. The aim is to cover "the most critical period for many families, to find solutions on the childcare front, also in economic terms," stressed de Pascale, pointing out that, after August, often "summer centres do not reopen".

The experimentation will start in 42 municipalities in the region (including all the capitals and several mountain and inland unions) and will then be included in the new regional law, with the prospect of extending the measure to all the region's municipalities next year. To make the project structural, the estimated investment is about EUR 10 million per year.