With W the Scuola Sant'Egidio in the field against early school leaving

Emanuele, 12 years old. "When lessons started, a couple of hours a day after a month of emptiness, it was a nightmare. I connected with my mother's first phone which was jerky, too old, and then at home I got bad reception. My brothers around playing, fighting, chasing each other. My head was bursting. I was already struggling in class, let alone like this. It was impossible to understand anything. The homework was too difficult and uploading it to Weschool was impossible. The professors kept putting me off, notes, warnings... and in my head I started thinking 'but isn't it worth it, isn't it better to not give a damn? And so I started to do".

Priangka, 13 years old, arrived in Rome from Bangladesh at the end of March 2020. "At the end of October they called us that maybe there was a place for me and my brother, we started to attend school and there began the worst period of my life. I didn't speak Italian, I didn't understand a word teachers and classmates said to me but I could see their giggles. Every morning I woke up with the only desire of being on the other side of the world... The months passed and my anxiety grew. Every morning to get through the school gate I had to take deep breaths but it was getting harder and harder. Eventually I gave up and stopped going in'.

Ordinary stories of dropping out of school during the pandemic. But also stories that within a few weeks turn into stories of happy recovery thanks to the W la Scuola programme opened by the Community of Sant'Egidio in January 2022. Even today, the data - illustrated in a conference in the Sala della Lupa in Montecitorio with the president of the Community Marco Impagliazzo and some deputies including Anna Ascani, Paolo Ciani and Irene Manzi of the PD and Giovanna Miele of the League - are worrying: out of 800 reports received, thanks to the network created with institutes, families and various realities in the area, in Rome alone 55 per cent concern cases of minors not enrolled in school. And this is evidently the tip of an iceberg. But the data also say that recovery is possible: as many as 98% of the minors followed by the programme have resumed their studies. At the centre is a new figure, that of the 'school facilitator', who together with the intercultural mediator acts as a link between the families, the school and other realities in the area.

The operations centre, active since January 2022, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, operates through a coordinator assisted by operators, with an in-person reception desk, a contact centre service (068992244) that can also be reached via WhatsApp, and a dedicated e-mail address (wlascuola@santegidio.org). And prevention work is fundamental: although drop-out occurs in high school, more than half of the reports concern primary school children. The children most at risk are Italian children who live in family situations of poverty and/or lack of trust or rejection of school, foreign children who have recently arrived in Italy but who, although motivated to attend, are blocked by bureaucratic and linguistic obstacles, and Roma children who continue to be over-represented among those with intermittent school attendance: they are 8.7 times more likely to drop out than foreign children not born in Italy.

"School concerns the country as a whole and its future," is Impagliazzo's appeal. The W la Scuola programme weaves relationships that were broken between school, family and territory, successfully combating school drop-out. In the time in which we live, full of loneliness, many ask to be accompanied in the difficulties they encounter, and the school is rightly a being together in the time of loneliness, it makes equality between those of different origins and communicates peace'.