About Romania School

Our school is situated in Bacau, Romania and it serves a school population of 1400 students from kindergarten up to the 8th grade. Our region is disadvantaged from an economic and social point of view. We are struggling with high unemployment rates and social problems caused by the massive emigration of the population to other EU countries. This situation affects the school life of students whose parents fall in either of these categories, who grow up with a feeling of abandonment and are vulnerable in front of the students who come from well-off families. Our students belong to different social categories: some of them come from educated families with a good financial situation but we also have students who come from poor families with parents working abroad, the students being left in the care of their grandparents or relatives. 10% of students from the target group come from mono- parental families, 3 have special needs and follow a special curriculum. We also have students who commute from the outskirts. We think that a project about bullying would be extremely welcome as bullying is a problem which affects increasing numbers of students in our school. This phenomenon has become more and more present in our lives and is caused by the differences among students, in terms of social and financial background. We intend to raise pupils’ awareness about this phenomenon and make them develop a responsible attitude. Our school needs to exchange practices with other European schools in order to be better prepared to deal with the needs of this category of children. Following reports by the Pupils' Council, parents' requests, questionnaires applied on students and the statistics from the school counselor, which defined bullying as an urgent problem, we decided it is high time we took action in this direction. Therefore, we decided to join this partnership in order to be able to cooperate with other EU schools dealing with the same problem, to observe the policies implemented by other schools, ways to identify these problems and to contribute to the development of a common strategy. Almost ten teachers will be involved in this project. The project team is made of Chiciu Oana, an English teacher who has been involved in different Comenius; Bratu Rodica, our school counselor, experienced in working with children with different needs/problems; she is involved in a lot of national educational projects; Simion Roxana, an English teacher with excellent organisation skills, who will be involved in the dissemination activity. Although we have no formal Erasmus+ experience, we do have Comenius experience and have also been involved in some of the activities designed for Erasmus+ projects by our County School Inspectorate. We tried to apply for Erasmus+ partnerships in the past, but our attempts were not successful.