Schools play a crucial role in civil society, as education drives growth, competitiveness, and economic development. Ensuring the safety of school buildings against natural and man-made hazards is a priority worldwide, as demonstrated by increasing risk mitigation efforts supported by national governments and multilateral agencies.

In Italy, following the 2002 S. Giuliano earthquake, OPCM 3274/2003 required a seismic vulnerability assessment for all strategic (e.g. hospitals) and critical buildings (e.g. schools), initiating the first comprehensive strategy for risk mitigation of public buildings. After that, several retrofitting programs were funded (e.g., Law 77/2009, which allocated around 1 billion euro in 2009).

Since 2019, the MARS (Seismic Risk Maps) project has been funded by the ICPD to assess the seismic risk of different assets, including school buildings. Several researcher units belonging to the ReLUIS (Network of University Laboratories for Seismic Engineering) consortium, with the cooperation of the EUCENTRE (European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering) Foundation, have contributed to the development of seismic risk maps at a national level, using a proper vulnerability model, named “School-MARS model”, which considers fragility results obtained for Italian schools in their as-built condition (Cattari et al. 2024, DOI: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2024.104822).

In the ongoing 2024-2026 MARS-CARTIS project, the seismic risk of schools is being further updated by using a new school inventory provided by the Italian Ministry of Education, including information about the retrofitting interventions. In the framework of large-scale vulnerability assessment, some archetypes representative of retrofitted types using the most common techniques are being selected from a large database of real school buildings located in different Italian regions.

In the present paper, the database, which currently contains more than 50 retrofitted school buildings encompassing both unreinforced masonry and reinforced concrete structures, is analysed in terms of type and strategy of intervention (i.e., local, upgrading and full rehabilitation), performance improvements and actual costs, thus also providing useful information for the development of future risk mitigation programs.