Our school is located in Santarém, in the centre of Portugal. We are surrounded by the river Tejo, which at the time is highly polluted. Our students are often drawn to projects that intend to handle pollution. We intend to make them better and more conscious human beings that care about preserving natural resources.
We also worry about the food available for students in school. In our cafeteria and in our canteen we don’t have fast food or fried food, but the school is surrounded by cafeés and many students, with parents’ permission, choose to have lunch in the café and eat unhealthy food.
We need to alert students and families more and more to the importance of a healthy diet because we have some obesity and overweight problems in students.
Our school is located in an advantaged area: transport to school is quite easy and the school has many facilities. However we have students who are disadvantaged for socio-economic reasons, these students will surely be included in this project because their parents don’t worry about healthy eating as an alternative to cheaper and faster food.
Some families still have no access to the internet at home and with a European project they will be able to use school computers to communicate, most of them for the first time, with students from other countries.
We have also 20 different nationalities in school, The students from ethnic or minority groups at schools will be motivated to join the project and to take part in the activities as the project intends to create a better school atmosphere.
We are the head school of a group of schools with students from 3 years old to 18. Our school, the head school of the group, has students from the 8th to the 12th grade. After the 10th grade, students can choose, sciences, foreign languages and history or geography, and also economics.
We also have professional courses: Theatre and Interpretation, Informatics, Multimedia and Events ‘ Organization.
We take part in several projects, and competitions every year and we try to teach our students to work on their own and develop different skills that will help them In their future.
We have in our school different Projects/Clubs that students can enrol for: Ceramics, European Club, Unesco; ADN Club, Informatics Club, Apps For Good, Cinema, Sports and the Geography Club, the Farm club where students themselves grow vegetables like lettuce or cabbages, that they then sell to the school community.
We also have the school choir that students can join.
We consider ourselves a school that values entrepreneurship and we are always ready to support our students.
This year we have about 1300 students, 120 teachers.
From our experience with former Erasmus+ projects, we are sure they give teachers an increased motivation to increase students’ achievement and increase students’ motivation for learning in order to prevent school failure and early school leaving prevention.
