Interview to our head teacher
Below you can find the English script of questions and answers in the interview:
How does our school save energy?
- What kind of European investment are provided in order to save energy?
- How does the ministry deal with the problem of earthquakes in seismic risk areas and which kind of contòrols are performed?
- How are the teachers and the students informed in relation to security measures?
- What are the facilities devoted to sport activities in our school?
- How is this school different from the others with reference to facilities?l
Here are the answers our head teacher gave us:
1. The school saves energy firstly rationalizing the consumption.
This means that, when it comes to electricity lights are turned on and equipments are used only during the teaching activity.
About the heating, for two years now there has been a timer for the heating program which takes into account the actual activities carried out in the school , then the timetable varies in relation to the time of the year, and depending on the activities that are actually carried out during the afternoon.
For example, our school is always open because there are the evening classes, but in the afternoon the heating is turned on only in the areas where the classes are held, because we have an heating system divided into sections, then we can keep the heating on only in the concerned sections.
Moreover, our heating system is managed by a company:
this type of organization is decided by the province administrators and this company must perform planned interventions in favour of energy saving (talking about heating) to economize, and to this purpose they have already replaced a part of the fixtures and a part is going to be replaced in a short time. Besides, some heating sensors have been put in the different floors to punctually monitor the temperature of each floor end of each school area
Both electricity and heating are managed by province administrators, who, in our organization, are in charge of the structure. For example the payments of bills related both to electrical energy and heating are their responsibility. For this reason the interventions aren't planned by the school but by the province administrators. There are some European grants like the ones for the production of alternative energy, this is why in our school they have set some photovoltaic panels for the production of electrical energy. This operation, however, has been done by the province: in fact the energy produced by the panels, is not for the benefit of our school but for the benefit of the province, and it is managed by the province administration for the needs of the territory.
All these interventions aren't managed by our school and there isn't a direct benefit for the school.
Last year some calls were launched for the restoration and setting of some school facilities, these calls were launched by the Ministry of Education on the base of European grants but in this case it was always the province who submitted any kind of projects and then took part to the selections.
In the past years, however, our institute submitted a plan for the replacement of the window fixtures which was approved and allowed us to replace the fixtures in some areas and to do other jobs which we are about to start.
There are unfortunately some delays for the grant supply then some interventions have to be slightly delayed.
2. The ministry asked the province to make some controls on the school building static and as far as I know this school was the only one that had a punctual detection and then it was ranked according to the expected standards for seismic safety.
Having a static certification of the school will make possible some specific interventions that were programmed after the earthquake, not because some damages were detected to the structure but because having a certification made in the past allows us to say which improvements we need to realize.
The Ministry of Education asks the schools to do some checks, of course this conflicts a bit with the resources available to the province administration and the fact that in this particular period in Italy there is a political reorganization (or at least there was a reorganization attempt of the provinces interrupted by the constitutional referendum which wasn't approved) created a difficult situation from the point of view of the organization because the provinces were partly reorganized but now this reorganization is deadlocked…
3. We have a safety plan, which means we have a plan for the emergency management and it is renewed year after year by the director of prevention and protection service. This particular role exists in any public structure and so we have it in our school. The plan is usually presented at the school –year start, during the first teachers meeting, then it is communicated to students and published on the school website.
Teachers must attend a training course about safety, which is actually compulsory by law for employees. It includes 12 hours of training and it must be updated every five years. Our school has organized the course in 2013 and will do the updating in 2018.
The teachers who have been employed with a fixed-term contract or employed after 2013 will have to be trained for safety through courses which are periodically organized. The next one will be in February. There is also a prevention and protection service where specific roles and assignments are given to the personnel. So we have first-aid or anti-fire operators and this year we have organized a course for the so-called “preposti” who are the operators in charge of the laboratory activities, because for us the most relevant activity for safety reasons is that of labs. This year we are going to train technical assistants and technical-practical teachers who are the two types of operators who assist students in labs. Students are trained for safety as well, because they are considered as employees when they use the labs and this training is done during the third year of school for 12 hours.
As to the evacuation plan at the beginning of the year it is presented to students so they are informed about it. Of course this year a further action has been performed because of the seismic events and the emergency plan has been revised and communicated to students, then published in a specific section in the school website.
4. In this school we have a sports hall that is a big structure where the students can play volleyball and basketball and practice physical activity. We don't control this structure but it is managed directly by the province administration so it is also used by other people from outside the school . Inside the school we have two little gyms: one where the students can practice physical education with gym equipment and a smaller one. Once we had the opportunity to do physical education in the yard and actually we still partly do it but that area should be maintained and we have submitted a project to the Ministry in order to build a five-a-side football pitch . We actually don’t know whether it will be approved or not.
5.The main feature of this school is definitely the vastness, actually no other school in the province of Terni is so big.
It is also a quite old school, because it was built in the early sixties, so it is a school that enjoys large indoors and outdoors, just because at that time the school facilities were made that way . It is not a a prefabricated building, it is a masonry building, and this is another advantage from a thermal point of view because it provides better insulation. Of course, being a school built so many years ago and also being so large, the interventions become complicated. The replacement, for example, of the window fixtures of the whole school requires a very strong investment, because of the vastness. The workshop area built in the typical style of the 60s companies, has very large rooms with very high ceilings, which have their own charm but also give big problems, such as thermal insulation and energy consumption, so the fact that the school has an important and significant history is both our wealth and our limit.
A refreshment of exterior painting requires a significant outlay while we have managed to improve the interior spaces thanks to our partly self-managed work.
We were able to improve the structure even from an aesthetic point of view, even if the available resources of the province are not the same that there were once so the interventions are not the ones that would be needed . It is very important to get students aware in terms of energy saving and correct use of the heating and electricity and also sensitise them to care of common areas.