Students Present Practical Community Proposals at City Council
They listened for almost an hour to the speeches from… “adults” before presenting their proposals. Simple, direct, and practical ones, without many legal references—often unfamiliar and incomprehensible even for adults—repeatedly invoked.
These were seventeen students from section A of the second year of middle school, accompanied to the city council by their literature teacher Pina Platania. They submitted concrete requests and actions for the community and their school to the local authorities gathered for a public assembly.
Reading through the list of things to do, written in italics on a notebook sheet later handed over to Mayor Giuseppe Lombardi and filed with the city council records, little Martina, a clear voice despite her rightful nervousness, was among them.
The students’ priorities among their requests
The students’ program begins with a focus on the elderly, emphasizing the “necessity to create a day center where they can spend their free time together.”
The second point highlighted by the young students concerns the state of decay of the school building and the need to make the structure a “safe and welcoming place.” For this, they suggest that “the interior furnishings of the school should be improved, and the exterior maintained,” with the addition of a garden in the English style with accompanying play areas.
Outside the school, the students dream of a sports center equipped with an indoor swimming pool. But they don’t only focus on leisure and entertainment.
The new generations demonstrate a positive concern for the environment — more bins for separate waste collection are needed, they wrote — and also show a strong hunger for digitization. “We request,” Martina continued, “the possibility of having a computer in every classroom, there are six, to be used at any time.”
This is a legitimate request that is not difficult to implement, unlike some others that are more challenging to realize. “The sports center has always been a priority for our administration,” replied Mayor Lombardi. “We have already identified and purchased the land (in Cassone, ed.), but honestly, maintaining an indoor swimming pool is too costly.”
However, the idea of an outdoor pool with play areas in the current sports field is not to be excluded. Regarding the opening of a recreational center for seniors, the social services counselor Livio Concini recalled that in the Villa Toblini nursing home, recently renovated, there are spaces that could be dedicated to daytime activities.
“We have some ideas on this and hope to realize them soon.”
