The garrisons, 'a centralized alert channel is needed'

A "centralized alert channel" is needed. With the bomb threat reaching thousands of schools across Italy, school leaders found themselves on the front line, called to make decisions involving hundreds of children and young people: should they evacuate the schools or not? Send them home or keep them in the outdoor areas of the schools and then let them return once the alarm is over? Decisions that have aroused appreciation but also, in some cases, criticism and controversy. For this reason, it is precisely from them that the request to the government comes from: the alert system must be reviewed and a common line must be found, to avoid a heterogeneity of choices.

The school managers, while applauding the common operational protocol for the management of alarm reports, therefore ask that "its implementation be accompanied by a centralized alert channel capable of alerting schools in real time when a massive attack is underway". Not only that: they ask the Viale Trastevere ministry to design filtering and recognition systems for recurring patterns, "to prevent each school from having to face threatening messages alone". The schools' email addresses are public and the institutional mailboxes are in fact managed centrally by the Ministry of Education.

"What happened - reasons the president of the ANP principals, Antonello Giannelli - also forces us to recognize that the interconnected world in which we live has its fragilities and that the freedom we enjoy in Western countries can be exploited by ill-intentioned people to sow fear with a simple email message. This does not mean we must give it up. Responsibility now requires us to look clearly at the weak points of the system". For the principals, however, these days showed the importance of emergency exercises. Attilio Fratta, president of the other principals' union, DirigentiScuola, focuses attention "on the pressures that a school director has to face on a daily basis and the enormous responsibilities that he must take on quickly and without concrete support".

For the Uil school "it is unacceptable that a school director takes decisions autonomously on such serious and delicate issues. The paradox is evident: if he closes the school, incorrectly assessing the danger, he risks protests for interruption of public service; if he doesn't close it and something happens, he risks being held accountable". While the CISL requests that support groups for schools be activated in each territory, coordinated by the Prefectures, with the involvement of the territorial school offices, the police, the Fire Brigade and local authorities, with the task of ensuring coordination between all the subjects, guaranteeing schools support in the management of emergencies such as those of the last few days.