School partnerships

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A wiki or database could help to match partner schools in developed countries and partner schools in developing countries. The OLPC project may be well-suited to promote school partnerships because of the attention the project is bound to attract.

Matching schools in developing countries with twin schools in developed countries could help to finance housing projects. According to the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2007 Summary "good housing for teachers with running water and electricity is probably the most cost-effective way to attract and retain teachers in rural schools".

A model could be a cooperation between both schools' parents' societies where the parents from the developed country financed a guest house for the school in the developing country. The financing parents' society could retain ownership of the building and lease it to the school or the parents' society in the developing country.

Such a guest house could also accommodate visiting foreign language assistants or other visiting teachers.

Ideas

Equipment

Parents' societies could also lease equipment, e.g. small tractors, mini combine harvesters, biodiesel processors, cordless power tools, water purification systems and solar air conditioning [1] to their associated parents' societies in developing countries. Semipostal stamps for email could be used to provide proportionate cofinancing to eligible projects. A connection to the OLPC project could be that the OLPC could offer training programs for recommended equipment. Child safety would probably be an important criterion; the OLPC could also keep track of the age of the user and restrict equipment documentation to the appropriate age groups so as to avoid a false sense of competence. Dangerous equipment should obviously come with documentation that explained possible injuries, their treatment and how to avoid them.

The companies receiving recommendations for their products this way would probably be willing to contribute the software. This could be connected with a Software Award: The product vendors might be motivated to hire software vendors to write the software according to the guidelines of the software award and to aim for award winning entries, which could also conveniently provide the first contestants.

Equipment could serve several purposes:

• It would allow a school to train use and maintenance of the equipment as vocational training, which could include operating a model farm at the school.
• It would allow a school to rent the equipment to people who had need for it and, possibly, to make some money for the school this way.
• It could increase the reputation of a school, enabling it to easier attract and retain teachers.
• It could motivate the formation of a parents' society and make continual membership attractive.
• It could allow a school to make adult education more attractive.

Regional ideas

In Hesse the program Unterrichtsgarantie Plus [2] might, for example, provide necessary funding to allow a school to hire a (trainee) teacher from a developing country as a foreign language assistant (teaching his or her native language), who could visit Germany and learn (e.g.) the German language for a year and then return to his or her own country and might have earned enough to stay several years at the partner school without a salary from the local government, before, possibly, visiting again. A chance for early enrollment into such a program could provide an incentive for students to decide to become teachers.

Footnotes

1. ^  tuition guaranty plus: schools receive 1000 € additionally for every teacher they have to hire supply teachers in order to avoid canceled lessons

See also

• eTwinning: School partnerships in Europe