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Portugal Forte da Casa Agrupamento de Escolas do Forte da Casa
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Agrupamento de Escolas do Forte da Casa is a group of 3 schools under the same board administration. We include grammar (primary) school, middle level school and high school level. We are a public school and therefore our status is “public body”. All teachers are recognized by the ministry of education and most of them (around 90%) belong to the permanent school staff. We serve a population of 1700 students, 160 teachers and 30 auxiliary and administrative staff. Our school systems requires students to stay in school for 12 years or until they are 18 years old. Since we want to promote success among our students we had a dilemma with the three last year’s cycle. To prevent an early school abandon we started to offer vocational courses along with the traditional curricula. So on one side we have the traditional literature, languages, physics, biology, arts, and mathematics courses for students that want to apply to university. On the other side, we present vocational courses for students who want a certification so they may start working or (it is also possible) as external pupil apply to university. Therefore we have vocational courses of Tourism, Social animation, heath assistant, multimedia, software and ITC and sales. These schools are located at a peculiar place because we are not for from the capital (Lisbon) nor the main city (Vila Franca de Xira) and in this area we had people coming to settle from all over the world. Therefore we have students from different African countries (Portugal former colonies) and from some eastern countries. So this area is a melting pot of cultures and traditions some of them risking to be buried under the cover of socialization. We try to keep them alive and try to balance the acquisition of different social rules with the traditions from their parents’ homeland. As far as logistics for the project, although we are a group of schools, each school is equipped with full libraries, ITC resources and sport facilities, cantinas and students cafeteria. |
