Schools collapse on the island: 5,000 desks remain empty.

There's just over a month to go until the start of the school year, and amid the flurry of teaching positions to be filled, tenure-track positions, and two-person headteacher positions, there will be 5,000 fewer students than the 176,000 students expected in 2024.

This is a huge figure that, for the first time, will have a huge impact on primary schools , where there are approximately two thousand fewer enrollments, and therefore fewer than 50,000 occupied desks.

Numbers that tell the story of the emptiness of the demographic disaster in Sardinia , a region with the lowest fertility rate in Italy (0.95 children per woman) and a number of births that, according to Istat.

It had already dropped below 13,000 in 2012, to reach below 10,000 in 2018, down to not even 8,000 in 2022, and 7,037 last year (five hundred less than in 2023).

The full article by Piera Serusi in L'Unione Sarda, on newsstands today and on the Digital App.