The supreme Court of Cassation
on Tuesday found Italy's education ministry and a school in the
north-western Friuli region guilty of discrimination against a
disabled pupil, ordering compensation of 5,000 euros to the
child's parents.
The public school system must guarantee equal access to
education, and this means kids with special needs must get all
the support they need in order to attend school on an equal
footing with their peers, the court said.
Individual schools have no discretion in the matter, the
court added.
"In cases of severe handicap, school authorities have the
tools to fully implement measures that correspond to the needs
of the child," the court wrote.
The ruling came in the case of a totally disabled child who
had been assigned 25 special education teaching hours a week,
allowing her to attend pre-school full-time.
However her school, the Comprehensive Institute in the
northern city of Udine, gave her a special needs teacher for
just 12.5 hours a week.
The school and the education ministry argued in their
defense that there was no discrimination because pre-school is
not mandatory.
The court answered that guarantees of disabled children's
equal right to an education includes pre-school.
The rest of the class would also benefit from the full-time
presence of a disabled peer, "which might lead them to respect
and accept diversity as part of the diversity of humanity
itself," the judges wrote in their opinion.
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