Courses to attract young people from Rabo de Peixe in one of the most abandoned schools have not opened

One of the schools with the highest truancy rates in the country has built modern workshops to attract students at risk of dropping out, but they are lying dormant due to a lack of funding, the head of an Azores school has said.

The Rabo de Peixe Integrated Basic School on the island of São Miguel is considered one of the “black spots” of underachievement and school dropout: “The dropout rate in the Azores is twice as high as on the mainland and in Rabo de Peixe. At the Peixe school, this is twice the average in the Azores,” lamented the president of the Ribeira Grande city council, Alexandre Gaudencio, in an interview with Lusa.

Almost half of the students who were at risk of failure at the end of the first semester were forced to drop out of school, said Andre Melo, president of the executive board of the Escola Básica Integrada de Rabo de Peixe. A survey conducted this year showed that 47% of 2nd and 3rd year students frequently miss classes.

Many children reach 5th grade and lose interest in school. They cannot follow subjects and gradually begin to skip classes.

“We know right away when they don’t want to be in the classroom. They have difficulties, they cannot concentrate, and we continue to persist in regular training,” the director lamented.

To combat the failure, the government has spent around €20 million retraining the school: the modern building now houses a sports centre, swimming pools, an athletics track overlooking the sea and carpentry, ceramics, mechanical, electrical and culinary workshops.

The workshops are ready for use, but there is not enough equipment and materials for work, the director said.

For example, the giant kitchen looks like a set from a TV show or soap opera. It has a huge island with a stove and hood, a sink and giant cabinets with built-in appliances, but there is nothing inside the cabinets: no dishes, no food, no condiments for cooking.

“We have five workshops, but they are not working yet due to lack of funding. We cannot purchase the necessary materials to conduct various activities with students, although this is what they need,” said Andre Melo.

These projects can help students become interested in school again, instead of “sitting all day with a notebook in front of their eyes and a teacher,” he said.

However, the only workshop used is the carpentry shop. The materials the students use are trash collected from the beach by teachers, Vladimir Ferreira, a professor of technology education, told Luse.

Bottle caps, pieces of colored plastic, sticks and pieces of fishing nets are used to make the sculpture, which is to be displayed on one of the school walls, like others already on display.

When Lusa visited the school, there were only two students in Vladimir Ferreira’s class. The teacher said that there are usually more than a dozen of them in a room, but during municipal festivals the number of absences increases.

In a school with about two thousand students, finishing the 9th grade is “already a big victory,” the director admitted, explaining that after several failures in the 3rd year there are still many 17-year-old students. cycle. Having reached adulthood, they leave school.

The Azores is the second region in Europe with the highest rate of early school leaving (21.7%), behind only the Romanian region, sociologist Fernando Diogo said.

The situation in the archipelago has been improving since the beginning of the century, but it is necessary to “continue on this path,” regional education minister Sofia Ribeiro admitted in an interview with Luza.

“Countless work has been carried out in recent decades to monitor young people,” said Sofia Ribeiro, highlighting that they have now begun to “monitor all students who are not enrolled at the end of the school year,” even if they are over 18 years old. .

For the first time this year, they analyzed “the enrollment of all students, filtering out those who had dropped out of the system without completing secondary education,” he said, explaining that they were offered “other pathways to combat early dropout.” “.