Scoala cu clasele I-VIII Negoiesti (Romania)

The Primary School of Negoiesti teaches 150 children aged 3-16 coming from Negoiesti and Popesti villages.
Our school is situated 50 km away from Bucharest and 15 km away from Ploiesti, the main city of our region. This is a highly industrial area, surrounded by oil refineries and power plants, this being at the same time an advantage and a great disadvantage for the people living here, as the air pollution is at a high level and there is also a chance of electromagnetic radiation less than 1 km from our school.
3 of our students have learning difficulties (SEN), all of them being integrated in the regular classes through the special curriculum programme.
We also have 10 students with social and financial difficulties, each of them receiving a monthly allowance from the local authorities and being included in a counselling programme. And we also have 10 students with a high risk of social exclusion and 2 of them are risking school abandonment.
And unfortunately more and more pupils are having discipline issues, some of them caused by an insufficient involvement of their families in their school life, others caused by family problems or simply the teenage "revolution" and we need to find new ways to deal with the indiscipline situations in a better, more positive way. One of the reasons of the families' lack of involvement in the students' school life is the increasing number of parents working abroad and leaving their children with their relatives (mainly their grandparents or uncles/aunts).
We need to get involved in an European school partnership because this is one of the few possibilities for some of our pupils to visit and to be visited by children from other countries and to travel abroad, experimenting the diversity and beauty of European culture and getting lifelong friendship relationships with students from all over Europe.
This project is a great opportunity for our teachers too, allowing them to exchange opinions and experience with their European colleagues and to enlarge their cultural horizons as well, getting in touch with different cultures and traditions and experimenting different approaches and methods on the topic of discipline and democracy matters in schools.