Hristo Botev School Board, Municipality of Sapareva banya
SOS-Friends Teams
Resume
The project aimed at increasing the general knowledge, understanding and affirming an active position of the pupils from the elementary schools towards topics of importance to the young people, but which are not covered within the educational process and regular classes: aggression, conflicts, and harmful addictions. The project helped the establishment of voluntary groups of children in all the schools, applying the principle children teach their friends . The main focus of the training covered the learning by doing approach, teamwork, interactive learning methods, role games, brainstorming, discussions, debates and round table meetings.
Background
In the beginning of 2005 the Municipal committee for prevention of crime among under-aged and young people in the Municipality of Sapareva banya analysed the general tendencies, related to the crime rates among the children in the elementary schools. The Directors of these schools outlined as major problems the conflicts and aggressive behaviour, mostly within children from 6 8 grade. The conducted psychological survey among children to measure the level of aggression and frustration resulted in high rates of the various types of aggression: physical, verbal, indirect aggression, opposition, conflict resolution through aggression. Much worrying was the tendency and frequent cases related to use of alcohol, smoking and drugs among the young people.
Practice
The training and education of the children are the two main functions of each school. Nowadays, school teachers are more concentrated in providing stable knowledge rather than taking care of the up-bringing of the children. In general when it comes to the prevention of the above-mentioned problems, there is a substantial lack of focused and targeted policy to increase the children s knowledge and awareness of the consequences of these actions. Therefore, the heart of the project was the idea to create and apply early prevention measures and overcome the negative consequences from aggressive actions, smoking, drugs use. Young people in general are more opened to learn and take examples from their friends or other young people; therefore the project strategy was to create teams of young people, teaching their coevals.
The first project step was the organization of a large information campaign (15 meetings) within the 4 local schools, involving the Directors, teachers, pupils and their parents. The meetings aimed at providing more information about the objectives of the project and its methods of work. The nest activity was the selection (on a competitive base) of these children from each school, who showed interest towards the project idea and had the wish to become part of the SOS-Friends Team. Each team gathered 5 children and each school formed its own SOS team. The project management conducted more than 40 interviews with the applicants in the schools and with the support from the parents and teachers 20 volunteers have been chosen to form the local SOS teams. All of them were highly motivated and interested in the idea, ready to work together with their friends and very opened to informal ways of learning.
The group of 20 children, with the special guidance and assistance from professional psychologists from the National Child Protection Agency, underwent training in 3 different interactive modules: conflicts, aggression and drugs. The trained young people were the core of the group, which main objective was to start and work with the schoolchildren in each of the 4 schools.
Each SOS team started to develop its own interactive class, including various topics and themes for discussion, information materials, role games, contests and interactive ways to present the problems, their consequences and the possible solutions. Then the next initiative was to organize similar interactive classes in all the schools within the municipality, led by the local SOS teams. As a summary of the young people s initiatives come the following: more than 50 educational activities have been initiated in the schools and more than 150 children took part in this new form of early prevention and awareness rising. 230 children were interviewed and the results from the survey were the positive assessment of the young people towards the project initiative and strong interest towards the innovative way of learning.
2 information leaflets have been prepared and disseminated among the schoolchildren, titled: I can take care of myself and You Chose! . The final event within the project was the round-table discussion, which gathered together the children, their parents and teachers. During the forum all participants agreed that this new initiative is a working model and instrument to encourage youth pro-active attitude and increase the awareness among the young generation about the consequences from drugs use, harmful additions and conflicts.
The innovative element within the project was the involvement of a group of young volunteers, who worked in an informal and interactive way with their friends from the schools and thus increased the effect from the project implementation. In many of the schools, such themes like drugs prevention, conflict resolution and crime prevention were subject of discussion for a very first time.
Results
- A successful and working model has been developed and implemented within the local schools, which helped the better awareness and crime prevention among the children.
- Many voluntary activities were stimulated among young people from the municipality.
- 20 children took part in an interactive training dealing with conflict resolution, crime prevention and aggression. These children take active part in teaching their coevals and schoolmates.
- More than 230 children took part in the initiative and their general awareness has been raised.
- More effective inter-institutional partnerships have been encouraged at the local level.
Contacts:
Spaska Boyadjieva
Project Coordinator,
2650 Sapareva banya
1 Germaneya str.
Tel.: (0707) 3378