27 ottobre 2023
The topic covered in today's article by Dr. Daniele Nappo, Legal Representative as well as founder of the S. Freud Private School, is the Educational Benefit, an intervention to support minors apt to provide school goods and services.
The school for decades has been committed to tackling educational poverty with projects and programs to support adolescents to help develop their talents and support their well-being. One of the tools put in place to address this very situation is the Educational Benefit, a personalized support intervention geared toward minors in socioeconomic difficulty, adopted in several projects. Concretely, the educational benefit provides goods or services to minors in attested conditions of socio-economic fragility and vulnerability, often reported by Social Services or schools. Data updated to December 2022 say that 2,430 children have been reached thanks to the collaboration between territorial partners who work on the identification of beneficiaries, the disbursement and monitoring of the dowries, and take care of the entire process of integrated caretaking, thus ensuring the success of the intervention.By 2023, the project is active in 10 Italian cities and intends to reach an additional 774 beneficiaries. The dowry certainly represents an educational possibility, and in some cases even the only one, that enables a boy or girl to have an experience of transformation and self-examination. Whether it is a sports course or a music course or a trip or vocational training what is being worked on is the beneficiary's realization that he or she can positively influence his or her life in a consistent and effective way. The meaning is self-determination. Even in cases where the endowment does not have a proven outcome, in terms of continuity and/or hoped-for results, it is confirmed, however, as a chance to learn something about oneself that will be useful in the training of the adult person.
The project, in addition to responding to the concrete needs and rights of individual adolescents, works on resilience and competence, contributes to the improvement of the starting conditions of minors, and strengthens the local Educating Community by extending on the intervention territories relationships and collaborations with the various interlocutors and actors. The project's uniqueness lies in its ability to capture the specific need of girls and boys and meet it in a timely manner with a mechanism capable of strengthening the youth's resilience.
It guarantees the provision of essential goods to ensure the right to study (school kits, support for children with Sen, Special Educational Needs, and Sld, Specific Learning Disorders), the possibility of attending extracurricular activities to learn, experiment, and give wings to their talents: sports activities, music, theater, photography courses. In short, they are given the opportunity to open their horizons and learn about other realities with which to compare themselves through summer camps, and educational trips. For children living in delicate and fragile family units, the stability of study paths is encouraged.The school has an obligation to monitor the educational pathway by intervening preventively when predictive indicators of dropout appear. It is necessary to ensure the possibility of choosing and being accompanied in the most appropriate educational path, paying specific attention to those who are facing the transition to the first year of secondary school. It is necessary to provide the possibility for 16- to 18-year-olds to re-enter a training, schooling or vocational pathway if they do not intend to finish secondary school for economic or social reasons by orienting them toward the world of work. The school can and must give a concrete example of how the Educating Community can contribute by having more and more co-responsibility towards the territory. In particular, a strong collaboration should be established with Social Services in the management of the most complex cases, coming to identify and respond in a connected and fast way to problematic situations and strong distress.
