“Vaçe Zela” nine-year school and “Kristo Frasheri” public high school are the newest educational facilities recently constructed as part of a modern complex of innovative schools project designed by the renowned Italian architect Stefano Boeri to provide spaces for contemporary education for over 1350 schoolchildren and students in the administrative units No. 9 and No. 11 in Tirana.
Prime Minister Edi Rama today attended the inauguration ceremony of the new educational complex, which he praised for its architectural innovations, emphasizing that the challenge remains the transformation of such spaces into new reference points, cultural and social centres for local communities.
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Hello everyone! The work speaks for itself more than any words we can carefully choose, but this is of course the case to express our appreciation to architect Stefano Boeri, whose main serious shortcoming is that he is an Inter FC fan, but he still compensates this shortcoming by delivering incredibly interesting designs of today’s architecture, not only in Italy, but throughout the world. And of course, Stefano has been atoned for his sin of being an Inter football fan now, as he has been providing an incredible contribution through his designs, starting with Tirana’s general local plan, a map of the future and a roadmap to march towards the future, by taking into consideration the points of reference set by him and, on the other hand, through both private and public projects, as it is the case with these new school buildings.
Today is a very beautiful day for education in Tirana, because this complex, which, for the sake of truth, has been subject and target of mockery and criticism, if we may term them generously this way, claiming that their images were “computer manipulations and 3D images, fantasies that would never come true,” – these are actually a much more beautiful reality than the one shown during the project presentation.
The challenge is not only simply limit to the satisfaction one feels looking at such architecture and such a great work done very seriously by the builder, but we should move further to transform these spaces into ones that not only create optimum teaching and learning conditions, but also into spaces that create and provide new opportunities for students, teachers that need to live and interact also during the after class hours, as well as for the local community around the school that, if we are sufficiently capable, can find a new cultural and social centre at these schools.
I would also like to repeat something that needs to be reiterated to tell parents and schoolchildren that we are about to enter a new phase of the pre-university education system, precisely designed to help children spend quality after school time, which, if not exploited properly, could cause troubles to children and the society itself and if used properly can strengthen the future of the kids and the society by providing them new tools to transform this time into an investment in knowledge and an investment in entertainment through cultural and artistic events, and of course into an investment in their health through physical activities.
There is a number of fresh elements to become part of our work on schools starting next year, as the government has already allocated a state budget fund to support these elements, starting with the arts and crafts program due to be included in the school curricula, which is designed to provide students and teachers with the opportunity to structurally establish their artistic, theatre, music, painting and crafting groups, a process we plan to deliver on two levels; first a general level and a second more sophisticated one for most talented pupils and students, by creating specific centres in every city for them to be taught more qualified lessons to further nurture and develop their talent. For example, this school is the ideal place to house such a centre for special teaching sessions on drawing, painting, music, acting and theatrical arts, and so on and so forth that could be made available not only to these school students, but also to the local community. This is a project.
Next project focuses on technology.
We are working on a new information technology teaching system in schools, being aware that building spaces of IT labs is not enough. It is absolutely insufficient to equip schools and labs with computers, because we should primarily make sure to provide the highest IT teaching quality. The lack of qualified human resources is the challenge we face in this aspect. We are fully aware that math and physics teachers teach IT classes in many schools across the country, but these teachers are not graduates in informatics and we are seeking to change this reality. At the same time we are seeking to improve quality of the IT labs at schools and all other school labs, because we are all aware that labs at are schools today are much better than they used to be until lately, because there were no school labs indeed until lately, yet the existing laboratories are far from being qualitative enough to stimulate experimentation during lab classes.
The next project under this programme is the sports project. Starting next year, in collaboration with the Albanian Olympic Committee, we plan to launch the sports movement in schools, providing the opportunity to all girls and boys, who wish to join this initiative, to create their teams and allow every school have its own team and every municipality host its championship as part of a national student championship. We will launch this project next year and significant changes will take place in this aspect within the third term in office.
The last element, which is not a program on its own, but part of this new approach to school and the education curricula, is what Tirana Mayor and architect Boeri briefly mentioned – at least we explored it prior to coming to this ceremony – namely construction of agricultural plots at every school.
I avail myself of this opportunity to express our gratitude to the Italian Ambassador. In this case it is not about an Ambassador attending an event as it is randomly the case with many ambassadors, and we appreciate them all, but it is about the representative from a country which is considered something more than just another country as it is about the neighbouring Italy.
Albania and Italy are really two different countries, but to be honest, we are of the same race, although history has divided us by a sea and apart from it they have also been blessed with Leonardo and Michelangelo, hundreds and thousands of other great artists – at a time when we were dealing with matters of a different nature – but today we are really more and more aware of the blessing we have to be like the back gate of that fabulous house that is Italy in the garden of Europe. What makes this even more sensitive is the fact that Italy is always more attentive, more and more ready and involved in our challenges, because now all the Albanians working and living in Italy have fully confirmed that they are an added value to Italy and are no longer that big problem they seemed to be at first when they appeared on the shores of Italy.
Concluding with this moment of sentimentalism for Italy and Italians, thanking also Fabrizio, the ambassador who is here with us today, I want to wish all the best to all the teachers, students and their parents and I hope that next year will be a better year for all, but it will certainly be a much better year for the whole staff of these two schools combined in one, which are already an environment of the highest and best standards for all those who have the job to regarding this environment.
