Scoala Gimnaziala Vama Buzaului is a primary and lower secondary rural school in the county of Brasov.  Vama Buzaului village is located at a fair distance from all urban centres of the county, in close proximity to the Ciucas mountain range.

Our school offers education to children aged from 3 to 15 years old within our main school as well as in our associated schools and kindergartens.  Our pupils come from diverse environments, many of them being disadvantaged due to low family incomes or belonging to ethnic minorities. We also provide education to dozens of special educational needs  children whom we strive to integrate in our mainstream classes as efficiently as we can.

Through being a part of this project we wish to improve the quality of the education we provide. We live in a diverse community and we would like to teach our children about embracing unity in diversity.

SEN education in Romania is also something in need of progress. We deal with an acute lack of resources to help SEN pupils reach their potential as specialist help is spread very thinly and one-to-one support is rarely available for those in need. We hope to learn how to be more resourceful, more creative and to learn new strategies of supporting our SEN pupils effectively.

Vama Buzaului is surrounded by splendid natural landscapes with great potential for attracting tourists, making preservation of the environment a high priority, especially in the context of European trends of sustainability. We wish to use the opportunity of being in this project to raise awareness in the community about the importance of sustainability and environmental protection.

We believe the common thread throughout all these goals is non formal, child-centred teaching. We feel the system, schools and teachers alike, should seek to meet each child’s individual needs rather than each child getting a standard, unimaginative, unvarying approach which more often than not does more harm than good. We are also very keen on getting the community involved in education and on changing mindsets for a brighter future.