A first-grade class in Marsala, in the province of Trapani, ended up in the regional anti-mafia commission. The reason? All children are children of offenders.
Salvatore Inguì, director of the social service office for minors in Palermo, reported this to the regional anti-mafia commission, which after eight months of hearings closed an investigation into the condition of minors in Sicily.
Inguì had been heard in an audition by the Antimafia on September 14 last year: "Last week a teacher called me and made me a list of children, this list of children ... He asked me if I knew them. I knew them all. , has listed twenty-two for me. What is the characteristic of these children? That they are all children of subjects with serious criminal prejudices. I said: 'but why are you making this list?'. As it happens, all these children are in one class elementary school, they start first grade and have only put children of this type in this class ".
For the president of the Commission Claudio Fava: "Perhaps this is something that deserves to be quickly pointed out because it seems to me the opposite of what the educational and community message of a school should represent. Above all in a reality, like the Sicilian one, in which the social discomfort of minors becomes the most formidable opportunity for criminal recruitment. It is important to understand whether this precedent is an isolated case or whether rather in the outskirts of Sicilian cities the choice of building ghetto classes where to amass the children of prejudiced or imprisoned parents is a trace that is not episodic. It would be the sign of a sort of institutional resignation to the already marked destiny of those children and to the social context in which they grow up ".
"In the formation of the classes all schools adopt criteria which are then those of creating heterogeneous classes within them - the words of Stefano Suraniti, director of the regional school office for Sicily -. In some schools, however, this goal is difficult to achieve because we are probably in the condition in which there is a higher percentage of socio-economic disadvantage, therefore in the suburbs there may be a greater incidence of families in difficulty or actually absent ... And where there is a higher incidence of disadvantage this obviously it also affects training, in the sense that they are more complex classes to manage ".
