Bills too expensive? In the metropolitan city of Cagliari , educational assistance for disabled high school students is cut. Therefore, it is the weakest who pay.
The story has surreal outlines, in form and substance. The parents of children who need the support of an educator (there are dozens and dozens and, according to the documents, constantly increasing) have seen the service cut without official communication: reduced hours of assistance, at the beginning, without a reason .
The families learned the reasons only through the (innocent) professionals who follow their children , who in turn received a note from the institution's Public Education offices. The document bears the signature of the mayor's delegate for the sector, Alessandro Balletto, and of the manager Bruno Orrù.
It is written that “in spite of ourselves, as you may have noticed, we had to arrange the start of the service from 1 October and the reduction of the amount of time assigned to individual students”. And it is the confirmation of the cut. A choice adopted “not lightly aware of the importance and delicacy of our intervention”.
Then the explanation: the requests for assistance have increased, with a “continuous increase in the number of users over the last few years which has, in fact, increased exponentially the financial needs”.
Educators must be paid. And to do so, in recent years, funding has grown three times. In addition, for the more complex cases, the TAR has imposed the further support of an Oss: other expenses. Which are split between the Metropolitan City and the Region.
Budget money is no longer enough. "Today the dramatic situation in which local authorities find themselves, basically due to the problems induced by the extraordinary increases in energy costs, does not allow us to make further adjustments", write Balletto and the manager Orrù, "For this we had to make a percentage reduction of the number of hours (of educational assistance) assigned to each student, which we have contained in the order of 30% ".
A percentage that involves: educators who follow more children with different needs, forced to run from one side to the other to plug the gaps. With an obvious expiration of the quality of the service and students who remain without assistance for a long time than necessary. Not abandoned, but sacrificed on the altar of scissors. Them, the most fragile.
Politician (Ballet) and manager (Orrù) also underline that so far the requests made to the Region for an increase in the budget have remained unheard. “We are aware that the situation is difficult for everyone”, concludes the document, “for this reason, in a particularly delicate historical economic situation for the whole of Europe, we ask you for your cooperation in this final phase of the year”.