Community School Development Project in Moldova (phase II)

Project duration: April, 2007 – March, 2010

Implementer: Programul Educațional Pas cu Pas/ Step by Step Moldova

Financial support: Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Soros Foundation Moldova

Other partners: ISSA (International Step by Step Association), Ukranian Step by Step Foundation, SIFM/ World Bank, Helping Hand Moldavia (the Netherlands)

Project goal: democratization of both classroom practice and school governance, building school-community partnerships for sustainable local development, and developing the nationwide community school network,

The project was building on the success of the previous tranche introducing the model of Community Schools to 22 rural institutions and training over 430 teachers in principles of cooperative learning underpinning community education. As a result, a range of social and vocational services have been developed in participating communities through active community involvement.

The third project phase focused on the following:

• Extension of the network of Community Schools.

Through a new call for proposals, the project network reached a total number of 32 community schools, with a configuration of 4 clusters with respective centers: 8 schools in the Central part (Chisinau), 6 schools in the South-East (Stefan-Voda), 6 schools in the South (Cahul) and 12 in the North (Balti).

• Building school-community partnerships and networking.

The experience of the first 22 Community Schools was broadly promoted and shared in the network, as well as in the broader network of schools implementing SbS methodology (359 schools); 5 articles in raion level and national mass media, national pedagogical journal, special publication for rural communities Alternative rural  (Moldova Social Investment Fund and Contact Center), information on the SBSM web-site www.pascupas.md.

Examples from other countries were shared during the visits of our international partners in the project Developing Community School Standards.

• Community mobilization.

With technical assistance from SBSM, Community Schools managed to efficiently mobilize local resources for their projects: local administration participated in the renovation of school space for community needs and committed itself to its maintenance.

To support Community Schools in developing new partnerships, SBSM provided 3 Community Schools with recommendation letters to donor organizations (World Bank small grants program and IREX/USAI Citizen Participation Program), showing matching contribution.

Another support to the local Community School projects was provided by the in-kind contribution of our Dutch partner Helping Hand Moldavia.

• Training and mentoring components

Throughout three years of project implementation phase, SBSM continued to provide training and mentoring assistance in Cooperative learning, Meaningful learning, Assessment and evaluatio to 32 network schools, including to 10 newly selected schools in Cooperative learning, Meaningful learning, Assessment and evaluation (totally to over 340 participants).

• Project quality insurance

In cooperation with other countries, SBSM developed the Quality standards and evaluation instruments and pilot-test it in 3 community schools from ContinYou/UK (www.continyou.org.uk),  Ukrainian Step by Step Foundation (www.ussf.kiev.ua), Nova skola/Czech Republic  (www.novaskola.org), Krasnoyarsk Center for Community Partnerships/Russia (www.kccp.ru), and Step by Step Moldova (www.pascupas.md)..