The Ghandi evening High School in Milan has been closed by Moratti. The worker-students will now be able to go to the private schools by paying impossible fees. For the last two months there is a permanent picket in front of the school (anyone who can, pop along and support the people). The TAR {administrative court} has decided to suspend the closure, accepting a request from the students. In spite of this, the city has not reopened the school. “Sciura” Brichetto Moratti, elected with her husband’s money, has other things to think about, unforgettable is her exhibition at Milan’s “Teatro Dal Verme” when she was the reader of an English text during a concert. She had spent weeks preparing and she was more emotional than for a speech at the United Nations. The people of the Ghandi who were present, luckily, put an end to the melodrama. They will never give up (but is it in their interests?). Neither will we.

Giorgio Bonera: “I am Giorgio Bonera, a Union delegate for the RSU union at the Milan Local Authorities, and I would like to talk about the experience of the Ghandi evening High School in Milan, a night school for worker-students that for years, has been welcoming people who want a second chance to complete their studies that they didn’t manage to do in the past. From our schools, people have come out who then have had the possibility of realising their dreams: we can cite Roberto Bolle, but also many others. Unfortunately, the city of Milan has made a choice that is not understandable and that is not justified by financial reasons, because the cabinet member has always denied that the aim has been to save money. All of a sudden there’s been the closure of almost all the courses of our evening High School. Our evening High School s have been made up of four subject areas: classics, science, socio-psycho-pedagogy and linguistic. It’s a school that had optimum results at the latest State exams in July, when all the students of the three subject areas that got to the final classes were allowed to take the exam and after that they got through. This is a distinct difference from the general situation in Italy where the number of people passing the exams has gone down.
In spite of this situation, a few days after that, the cabinet member explained to the Cabinet of the city of Milan that he wanted to close these schools. After that there was the formal action of the director that gave rise to the closure of almost all the classes. Two are remaining and in this case, the excuse, the bureaucratic pretext, which is that of respecting the State regulations that set down certain minimum numbers to start a class, it’s an excuse that has been denied by the cabinet member himself, and by the director himself. Because after that many other classes have been started, and they didn’t achieve this minimum.
Thus the local authority in fact has decided to make reference to a regulation that after that, when it wanted to, it has totally forgotten. The student protests have dragged on as time goes by: they started on 7 September with a picket in front of the school and they are still going on and by now we have got to 6 November, just about 60 days in which almost all the young people have been in the tents, on the pavement at the side of the school, including at night, alternating work during the day with the night-time picket, as well as other initiatives.

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