KA229 School Exchange Programme

Bielsko-Biała is a city in the south of Poland surrounded by the Beskidy Mountains, not far away from Cracow and Auschwitz, the cities famous for their history. Our school is the oldest secondary school in the city, founded in 1908 by a well-known Polish poet, Adam Asnyk. There are three levels, each with 4 classes of about 30 students. The students can choose to study in the classes of four different profiles: the humanities and foreign languages profile, with the extension of Polish and History, a Biology and Geography profile with sports extension, a Mathematics and Information Technology profile, with the extension of Mathematics and IT, as well as a Biology and Chemistry profile with the extension of Biology and Chemistry. Apart from English, we teach students German, Italian or French. Our students can choose from a wide range of extra-curricular activities, such as Nazism and Holocaust, History, Mathematics, Chemistry, Biology, IT and Photography, Geography, Literature, Humanities and Sports. We also have great achievements at the city, district and country levels in various competitions and tournaments, such as sports, foreign languages, literature, business and economy. The school provides an excellent care for the students with special needs and health problems. Extra classes are organised for both the students with learning problems and those specially gifted. The school is attended by the students coming from Bielsko-Biała as well as the neighbouring towns and villages, which makes our school society a great mixture of various personalities and ambitions with varied traditions and habits. However, such a situation causes a lot of problems connected with the place of birth and the social status of students (the ones from small villages are sometimes discriminated by their peers). Nowadays we can occasionally notice some acts and signs of intolerance among our students who seem to support far-right nationalist political movements and show verbal prejudice against immigrants and refugees. Our internal research among students showed that the school should conduct more anti-discrimination activities. Therefore, our aim is to educate well-behaved, open-minded students who are tolerant towards other people and other cultures. Tolerance also means that our students will be open to people with disabilities and different political and religious beliefs. We’d like to teach the students to cultivate their patriotic and local (regional) traditions but still being able to communicate with people of different nationalities. Presently, our greatest ambition is to enter into a successful partnership with schools from other countries and form a common Erasmus + project leading to an international exchange of the students. The project can show our students that” being different” does not mean being worse or strange.