The School and the Community Towards the Prevention and Reduction of School Dropout

Abstract

This paper aims to emphasize the importance of the partnership between school and community for preventing early school leaving and reducing the school dropout. In order to achieve a successful partnership, it is necessary to go through some steps of “exploration-evaluation-planning-training-initiation-achievement-checking-regulation-consolidation-action-implementation-assessment”. Thus, the four conditions for achieving this process need to be respected: communication, coordination, cooperation and partnership. The educational partnership is the form of communication, cooperation and collaboration offering the optimal support to the child at the level of the educational process. It involves a unity of requirements, options, decisions and educational actions between educational factors and it is carried out within the educational act. A successful partnership implies identifying goals and common interests useful for the partners and the community, finding the optimal way to organize and manage the available resources in order to achieve the purpose, identifying the competencies of those involved in these projects in order to achieve most of them and implementing changes for the benefit of the institution. Preventing the school dropout should be the highest priority assumed equally by the school and the community. Beyond national policies and strategies which are more or less applied, each community has its own characteristics and dropout causes have different values from one community to another. So, the two entities, the school and the community, need to find personalized and coherent solutions to prevent this phenomenon, which will surely define the structure of the future generations.