School headteachers to the Government: “We need a centralised alert system”

A ‘centralised alert system’ is needed. With bomb threats received by thousands of schools across Italia, headteachers have found themselves on the front line, called upon to make decisions affecting hundreds of children and young people: should the schools be evacuated or not? Should they send them home or keep them in the school grounds and then let them return once the all-clear had been given? These decisions have drawn praise but also, in some cases, criticism and controversy.

This is why the call to the government comes from them: the alert system must be reviewed and a common approach must be found to avoid a patchwork of decisions. School heads, whilst welcoming the common operational protocol for handling threat reports, are therefore calling for “its implementation to be accompanied by a centralised alert system capable of notifying schools in real time when a large-scale attack is underway”. Not only that: they are calling on the Ministry in Viale Trastevere to develop systems for filtering and recognising recurring patterns, “to prevent individual schools from having to deal with threatening messages on their own”. Schools’ email addresses are public, and institutional email accounts are in fact managed centrally by the Ministry of Education.

“What has happened,” argues the president of the ANP headteachers’ association, Antonello Giannelli – “compels us to recognise that the interconnected world in which we live has its vulnerabilities, and that the freedom we enjoy in Western countries can be exploited by those with malicious intent to sow fear with a simple email. This does not mean we should give it up. Responsibility now demands that we take a clear-eyed look at the system’s weaknesses.”

For headteachers, moreover, these days have highlighted the importance of emergency drills. Attilio Fratta, president of the other headteachers’ union, DirigentiScuola, draws attention to “the pressures that a headteacher faces on a daily basis and the enormous responsibilities they must shoulder at short notice and without any concrete support”.

According to UIL Scuola, “it is unacceptable for a headteacher to take decisions independently on such serious and sensitive matters. The paradox is clear: if they close the school, having misjudged the danger, they risk facing legal action for disruption of a public service; if they do not close it and something happens, they risk being held accountable”.