Radding a school isn’t always easy, in a very complex country like Italy. But if you struggle to get there, sooner or later you give up. With two possible consequences: theincrease in early school leaving and the abandonment of inland areas. If the services are missing, we move. This is what emerges from an in-depth study of Openpolis on the accessibility of schools conducted as part of the Observatory on educational poverty conducted with thesocial enterprise With children.
A student on the bus that takes her to school. Openpolis analyzed the travel times of the journey from home. Getty Images
“We wanted to understand the travel times between home and the 182 municipal hubs, i.e. the cities that offer services such as high schools and hospitals, to which we add the 59 inter-municipal hubs” explains Luca Giunti, analyst at Openpolis. “It turned out that there are 140,000 young people aged 6-18 who live in municipalities that are at least an hour away from the nearest city, and for 20,000 the distance between them exceeds an hour and a half». The most distant municipalities are those on the islands, such as Lampedusa, over 5 hours from Agrigento, but also some towns in the Nuoro area, such as Baunei and Tortolì, or in the provinces of Sondrio, such as Livigno, Salerno and Bolzano.
Openpolis: the data from Ragusa
But how do you reach the schools by public transport? Again, the data is highly variable. «90 percent of Italian schools can be reached by at least one public transport», adds Giunti. «As far as extra-urban transport is concerned, the average figure drops to 43.9. But even here, the average figure is not very significant, because there are so many variables». In the meantime, among the Polo Municipalities where young people live more than an hour away, we need to see which ones have the most young people of school age.
The list sees, in order, Eboli (with 60,000 children in the district), Ragusa, Bolzano, Oristano, Cagliari, Brescia, Olbia, Foggia, Catania and Sondrio. Among these 10, the level of extra-urban public connections is highly variable. The best performance is that of Oristano, where 75 percent of the school buildings can be reached by extra-urban transport. Followed by Olbia, Sondrio, Cagliari. The cities of the South are doing badly, i.e. Catania, Foggia and Ragusa, all below the national average of 43.9. Ultima Ragusa, where only 30 percent of the school buildings can be reached by extra-urban transport.
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