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I went back to school, again
Learn the story of Alisson, 13, from Euclides da Cunha (BA), who returned to study with the UNICEF Seal.
I've lived in a lot of places. Every year, I helped my mother with the bean harvest. I would leave the city here and go to the farm. I would stay there for a while, stop studying. When I came back, I would go to school again. I only changed friends, they had gone to another series”. For many years, that was the life of Alisson de Jesus, 13 years old. The son of a large family — there are nine siblings — and with financial difficulties, the boy had to move house many times: he lived with his mother on the farm, with his father in the city, with his older sister, with an aunt. With each change, he would stop studying, and he was left behind.
Alisson's trajectory began to take a different direction at the beginning of 2018, when he received a visit from Lucijane Neves, operational coordinator of the Active School Search in the municipality of Euclides da Cunha (BA), where she lives. Active School Search is an initiative of UNICEF and partners to help municipalities find and bring children and adolescents who were out of school to school.
At the time of the visit, Alisson was living with a sister and had left her studies once again. “Lucijane asked why I wasn't going to school. I said I wouldn't go because I didn't have a notebook and she said she would get me one... But really, I wasn't interested in going to school,” the teenager says, a little awkwardly. Alisson is good at math, but she hasn't yet learned to read and write
In a long conversation, the coordinator convinced the adolescent to give education a new chance. Lucijane knew that going back to school wouldn't be easy. Alisson was 13 years old and, with so many back and forth, she was four years behind in school. Instead of attending the 8th grade of elementary school, he would be enrolled in the 4th year, in which he stopped. The topic was brought to a conversation with Roberto Reis, director of the Professor Durvalina Abreu de Andrade Educational Center, where the boy had been many times, and would return to study when classes began.
“Alisson had already been a student at the school. But he was evading because of the family issue. Since he didn't have fixed housing, he followed his father, followed his mother, and, in a way, he was forced to leave school. When I came back, I had missed the year,” Roberto says. The adolescent story is no exception at school. “Today, 60% of our audience has age-grade distortion [two or more years of school delay],” explains the director.
Dealing with this challenge is not simple. “The teacher wants the school and the student of his dreams. But we don't find that reality. Age-grade distortion and learning deficits are our major challenges, because these are the students most at risk of dropping out of school,” he says.
Roberto and his team invest in pedagogical practices aimed specifically at these students, understanding their moment of life, the knowledge they bring, and what they need to learn. “To work with boys and girls who are behind school, we cannot continue at the same pace that the school has been adopting with those who have been studying regularly since the beginning of school life. Often, we leave out the grade in which the student stopped and started with the basics, reading, and writing. Only then will we be able to assess whether progress has generally been made”.
With Alisson, that watchful eye from the school has paid off. “In the first few weeks, Alisson was a bit sad, feeling weird at school because they weren't the same classmates he had in the previous grade,” says the director. In conversation with the pedagogical coordinator and the class teacher, the team began to follow the boy's steps and plan the classes so that he wouldn't give up. “Today, we realize that Alisson is totally comfortable at school. And he shows himself to be a very interested student”, celebrates Roberto. Alisson's first step toward a new story has been taken. There is still a long way to go, but everyone is confident. If it depends on Roberto, the school, and Alisson himself, this will be a successful school trajectory: “I went back to school again. What I like to do is study. I want to stay here and finish school. It's going to be good, because I'm going to learn to read, to write,” he says, hopeful.