New school year, old buildings: more than 50 per cent still unfit for use

It is as if the photo of Italian school buildings immortalised with a 4K smartphone were superimposable or almost superimposable to the snapshot taken in the early 2000s with an old Reflex camera. At least judging by the main results of the 25th edition of Legambiente's Ecosistema Scuola, which will be presented today and which Il Sole 24 Ore of Monday anticipates exclusively. Despite a quarter of a century of outline plans, the Good School, extraordinary funding linked to Covid-19 and Pnrr, our schools remain fragile and weighed down by deep territorial differences: not even one building in two has a certificate of agility and less than one in three has monitored its floors.

According to Legambiente's report with data from 97 municipalities (out of 112) relating to 7,063 buildings including nursery, primary and secondary schools, in 2024 only 47% of buildings will have a certificate of fitness, 45% will have a static test, and less than 15% of those in seismic zones have been designed or adapted to anti-seismic regulations (and in 54.8% of cases have not benefited from a seismic vulnerability check). Fortunately, there are exceptions. Five administrations (Benevento, Cosenza, Fermo, Gorizia and Udine) have carried out the most seismic upgrades, and 13 others (Agrigento, Ancona, Avellino, Brescia, Cesena, Fermo, Forlì, Frosinone, Gorizia, Naples, Pordenone, Rieti, Siracusa and Teramo) have all carried out vulnerability checks. Then there is the issue of attic safety: only 31.2% of buildings have had them diagnosed in the last five years: the figure is slightly higher in the South (36.1%), on the Islands (33.9%) and in the North (32%), while it slips to 22.5% in the Centre. It is a pity that action to make them safe has stopped at 10.9% nationally, with the South at 17%, the Islands at 15.9, the North at 9.2% and the Centre at 7.7.

In addition to additional services (canteen, transport, etc., on which see another article on this page) Italian state schools are also struggling on sustainability. Energy efficiency measures concern only 16% of buildings, and just 6.5% are in class A compared to 66.6% in class E, F and G. In a peninsula kissed by the sun, only 21% of schools have exploited renewable energy sources, with the paradox that the islands themselves are stuck at 10.8%. Not to mention maintenance. In 2024, the funds for extraordinary maintenance drop to 39,648 euro as a national average against the 43,563 of the last five years. The actual expenditure stops at 29,061 euro. In this case, the North is better off, with an average of 41,699 euro, while Southern Italy and the islands stop at 5,564 and 5,234 euro, respectively. And even ordinary maintenance is struggling, with just 8,338 euro on average. All indices, for Legambiente, of a serious lack of prevention. With the person in charge of schools, Claudia Cappelletti, saying: "For years new funds have been allocated for school buildings, yet they continue to be extremely fragmented, both by source and by level of government, generating a dispersion that hinders strategic planning and transparency in the allocation of resources".