Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

The courses are reserved for students ranging from the last year of nursery school to the last year of high school

Milan, September 15 2019 – The new school year begins and the Local Police initiatives involving children and young people to explain road safety education and respect for the rules are also resuming. For several years the Milan Local Police School has collaborated with Milanese schools with a dense network of meetings.

The courses are aimed at young people of different ages: from the last year of nursery school to the last year of high school. Last year, courses on road safety education were held which involved 37 thousand 972 children and courses on legality for another 16 thousand 859. In total there were 54 thousand 831 participants with different programmes, calibrated according to age groups.

The offer is varied and touches on different themes, from classic traffic education to legality, passing through cyberbullying or the dangers of the web.

It starts with courses for younger children such as the Belgiardino initiative, a practical road education circuit set up at the local police school in Milan, accompanied by vertical, horizontal and illuminated signs. In the presence of an instructor, the children practice respecting the signs, using the bicycles made available by the Scuola del Corpo. For those who are a little older there is the Bimbi in Strada course, a day that is divided into a classroom lesson with basic instructions on respecting the highway code and an outing near the school with field testing of the notions acquired. .

Still on the subject of road education, for children aged 16 to 18, there is the Legally Driving course: starting from a discussion on how to behave on the road, it also uses multimedia supports to simulate distracted driving, for example caused by use of the cell phone.

Also for them, the courses also touch on more sensitive topics, such as cyberbullying. In this case, the kids are asked to question themselves about what bullying is and what the "border" is that separates a serious joke from a crime, through workshops that stimulate empathic identification.

Or the dangers of the web: with Legalmente in Rete, in fact, both the potential and the risks of web browsing are illustrated to students and the useful tools for moving online safely are explained to young people. Among the main dangers, which in most cases young people don't even know they are facing, are geo-localization, sexting, revenge porn, grooming or identity theft. In fact, digital natives tend to easily reveal personal data, putting their privacy and their "web reputation" at risk.

There is also a course dedicated to addictions that can affect young people. The course promotes a program that ranges from the use, abuse and dependence on smoking, alcohol and narcotics to new forms of dependence known as "new addiction". The latter consist of a form of psychological dependence that drives, in a compulsive way, the search for an object or the implementation of a certain behavior (excessive use of the internet, smartphones, shopping, gambling, video games, food) . The project, divided into a single meeting lasting a maximum of three hours, has the aim of developing greater knowledge of the problem.

“The courses of the corps school are always much appreciated by teachers and students – comments the deputy mayor with responsibility for Security Anna Scavuzzo – and over the years the initiatives have been updated with the times and refined to present in a playful and entertaining way even complex topics and situations that can prove risky. Knowing the dangers and not underestimating them, from driving on the road to surfing the web, allows our young people to gradually face the situations they find themselves experiencing in a more aware way."

To register you must fill out a request form which can be downloaded from the Municipality website, at which link you can find all the detailed information on the different initiatives.