Partners

Our school, “Collège Maryse Bastié”  is  situated in the outskirts of Reims, a city  in theNorth-East of France, 130 km from Paris. It was named after a famous female pilot from the XXth century, Mrs Maryse Bastié,who embodies the victory of  “will over fragility”. It  welcomes pupils aged 11 to 15. They come from different backgrounds. 59% have social problems and 37% receive a grant. Our school has got a Special Needs section (SEGPA) dedicated to pupils with learning difficulties. Since last year, we also welcome a class from a medical institute. Our school was rebuilt in 1997 and the building is very well-kept. It offers great facilities to teachers and pupils (many classrooms, two gyms, a library, two IT rooms, science rooms). As many pupils often meet strong learning difficulties, try to play truancy or end by being real school leavers, the school community has tried to tackle the problems. So, a group of confirmed teachers has decided to experiment new ways of teaching, new ways of collaborating, to create motivating   creative class projects (theatre and improvisation workshop, artistic projects). A special place called the “footbridge” run by pedagogical assistants and teachers offers «one to one» lessons and tutoring. After being identified as potential early school leavers by their  teachers, the school community (the Principal and Vice Principal, the teachers, the nurse, the social worker, the careers adviser, the pedagogical assistants, and the parents) try to find adapted solutions to help them. The approach is also more global. Actions towards future pupils are developed, especially between pupils from  primary schools and parents as well. Stronger links are developed with the community centers around our school.  A new project, called «Open school» is planned for the coming months: it’ll give our pupils an opportunity to discover their school from another angle during the holidays. Now this reflexive approach needs to be enlarged to a broader scale, to a European scale. Our very positive experience of a former Comenius project“The World in our hands”(from 2005 to 2008) has induced us to look for partners to create a newpartnership dealing about “Early School Leaving” and to participate to the contact seminar in Amiens. In this new project we’ll be responsible for the evaluation process together with our Greek and Irish partners. We’ll also guide the creation of posters ,the logo competition and the writing of the travelling legends. http://www.clg-bastie.ac-reims.fr