THE “SCHOOL. MY CHANCE!” PROJECT – A CASE STUDY FOR PREVENTING PUPILS’ SCHOOL DROPOUT IN ROMANIA

Pupils' school dropout could be defined as an early and final abandonment of school before graduation, which prevents the pupil from registering in the following stage of education, losing in this way the possibility of benefiting from a proper and higher education. The statistics show that, unfortunately, in recent years school dropout rates have been increasing among secondary school pupils. The University of Oradea and The Bihor County School Inspectorate, Romania, have implemented a project called “School. My chance!” The aim of the project was to prevent and reduce the phenomenon of early school leaving by 100 pupils. The pupils attended five schools in Avram Iancu, Bogei, Carasau, Les and Suncuius, all village in Bihor, Romania, and were identified with higher school dropout risks. This paper proposes to present the partial results obtained at the end of the first period of the project implementation – the second semester of the 2010 / 2011 school year. The sample was represented by those 100 pupils from the above mentioned schools, who were included in Cognitive Therapy, implemented with the help of the project. The method consisted of analysing and comparing the pupils' school marks at the beginning and at the end of the relevant period. The results proved that, after one school semester, the pupils' marks remained rather unchanged, but in a few specific cases (schools or school subjects) small progresses were made. These results can, however, be seen as a significant success, because in education it is very difficult to obtain some spectacular improvements in such a short time and the most important aim of our project was to help those pupils to remain in the formal learning system so that that the positive conditions were created for their personal development.