There are not many instances of violent behaviour reported in our school (
General Education and Vocational Secondary School Juraj Dobrila in Pazin). According to the research conducted by the Public Health Department in Pula, only 0,5% students have reported the occurrence of physical violence and around 5% have reported exposure to some form of verbal violence. We would be satisfied with no violence at all, although that might not be realistic for now. However, generally we are content and we keep on working on prevention to achieve better results still. Our school runs a number of prevention programmes whose common goal is to achieve the school's vision under the motto „FRIENDSHIP – COOPERATION – CREATIVITY – COMPETENCE“, a vision created through collaborative efforts of our students, parents and teachers. An important part of this vision are the obligations of all the parties involved in its creation, as stated in the official document: „We shall work on making our school a safe and pleasant place. We shall maintain it and take care of its inventory. We shall spend quality time in it and maintain healthy habits.“ All of us who work at the school and attend the school strive to abide to these obligations.
To achieve our vision, we have implemented the School Prevention Programme, with the aim of eradicating addiction, risk taking behaviour and behaviour disorders. The goals of this programme are: enhancement of the quality of life, acquisition of general life skills, development of an optimistic outlook and positive attitudes towards ourselves, others, and life, promotion of positive values, attainment of healthy and desirable behaviour patterns and providing objective information on addictive substances. In order to reach these goals, many appropriate activities are conducted each school year.
The school programme includes nonviolence workshops, „The young for nonviolence and diversity“, held by external experts, which encompass an entire generation of students. Along with this, there are debates and regular classes on prevention-related topics, held by professional support staff, and teachers. For instance, as a part of the extracurricular group School of Democracy, we held two debates, one with the topic „How to deal with verbal violence“ and the other on „Different ways of seeing gender roles“. The extracurricular group Young Volunteers organized (as they do every year) the marking of the Pink Shirt Day (Anti-Bullying Day), when the employees and students show their awareness and support of the fight against bullying by wearing pink shirts. There were also classes on the subject of identity and stereotypes, which have dealt with the ways in which our attitudes towards people we perceive as different are formed and changed. Furthermore, we had a lecture on peer violence in one of our teaching staff meetings.
In the few instances when a violent incident did occur, the school gave special attention to each case through the cooperation of the professional support staff with the parents, homeclass teachers, principal and students, putting in its best efforts to resolve the issue. When it was necessary, external services were called in.
We also do our best to hear the students' problems and needs through the yearly programmes of homeclass teachers and the Student Council.
The school works hard to provide a lot of content for students and to motivate them through regular classes, free activities and extracurricular activities and projects.
The evaluations we conduct through self-evaluation and external assessment (done by the Public Health Department in Pula) show that there has been a decrease in the unjustified absences from class, rare occurrence of violence, good results at the end of the school year, accolades and many awards won in different competitions, and great interest for enrolment in all the school programmes (general education and vocational).
