ANOTHER CHANCE

    Elena Radu is more than just a teacher. She is a skilled negotiator, as she is often seen persuading parents not only to send their children back to school, but come back themselves to complete their own schooling.

    Created and sponsored by the state education ministry, the school persuades parents to join the "A Second Chance" program, which enables them to go through two years of study in one and to obtain a training qualification for such skills as hairdressing or cooking.

    "It enables them to break the cycle of poverty and unemployment," believes Radu.

    Parents and children both know that education is their door to a change that can lead them to a better life in the future. At the Bucharest No. 136 School parents replace children in evening classes trying to complete their education. These parents say that the school enables them to learn a trade and then get a better-paid job.

    Radu is trading her own life experience when negotiating with children or parents on the advantage of education.

    "I came from a modest Romani family with four children and only one person in the family has a job. My mother encouraged me to have an education, and now I am studying for my second degree. I present myself as a model for them."

    BRIGHTER FUTURE

    The Bucharest No. 136 School is seeing its efforts paying off. Children at the school have started to dream about a future career of teacher, police officer or doctor.

    Florentina, a 13-year-old girl, said while browsing through an art album in the school library that she wishes to become a doctor, or at least a medical assistant when she grows up.

    Her school-mate Daniela is more pragmatic: she wants to become a pedicurist. She blushed when Arsineta Florea, a teacher working in the library, said that Daniela had shown talents in that direction.

    But Ionescu knows that the only way for their dreams to come true is to go to school and even to college. The school director is proud of her former students who are now studying at universities.

    "The school will become much more beautiful two years from now, when the ongoing modernization projects finish," she said, adding that "the projects, financed by EU funds, will bring us a complete set of furniture, a new laboratory as well as an EU-standard sports hall."

Special report: Global News Day for Children 

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