Summer holidays are coming to an end: increasingly empty desks and schools not up to standard.

The bell rings in Sardinian schools, with increasingly empty desks , amid declining birth rates and dropouts. A net loss that fluctuates between 3,000 and 5,000 enrollments each year . Officially, the 2025/2026 school year schedule sets the start of classes on September 15th , but principals have the power to anticipate the return to class by independently managing a certain number of days out of the two hundred required by law. Instead, we need to look to municipalities and provinces to assess the responsibility and management of the 85.8% of Sardinian schools that do not comply with safety certifications. This is the second-worst figure in Italy.

Start with problems

So it's the usual patchy start, kicking off the standard nine months of classes, this year for 170,000 students. The days ahead of the official calendar are being made up by June, perhaps to "build" a few long weekends. What hasn't changed, however, is the picture of school construction, a gigantic black patch stretching from Alto Adige across the country to Sicily, creating yet another national emergency: Sardinia is second to last in terms of the percentage of schools with incomplete documentation.

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