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Date: 2014.05.19
Posted by Helder Correia (Portugal)
Message: The school where I’m teaching is located in a rural area of Alentejo. 8th and 9th grade students, especially from families with low incomes, have the habit of misbehaving in class, boycotting classes, and maltreating teachers in order to be suspended from school for two or three days. This often occurs without their parents worrying too much about it, because their purpose and intention is to get into some seasonal work task during that period and get some money in return. Since education is compulsory, the only way for these students to work (and get paid for it) is to be expelled from school. Due to familiar low income situation, parents do not care about the fact that children do not attend classes as they will earn some money, and therefore will be able to help increase the family income. This is happening while one of the students involved in this kind of scheme, like many others,is receiving support to continue to study and for getting some expensive medical teeth treatment (almost all of his teeth are rotten). The class council and the school principal, together with the school psychologist (through psychological sessions with the student), decided to suspend that kind of support if the student and family continued to do as they have been doing. The student's attitude changed and he is now a very well behaved student with good results. Because of his family, who was more interested in getting a few more “euros” than in the boy's future, this student was about to quit studying. By "punishing" the family, a school dropout was avoided.
20 December 2014
Final Partners’ meeting
The fourth partners’ meeting took place in Florence (IT) on 15 December 2014. The meeting had the objective to check the activities carried out since the third meeting of the project and share and assess the in progress results. A special focus has been dedicated to the presentation of the strategies to solve the case scenarios.