CONGRESS OF CALASANZ FAMILIES. Calasanz School BOGOTÁ (Colombia)
Sandra Patricia Arciniegas. President
Families in Bogota Calasanz school is one of the educational project options. With this, we seek to strengthen the bond between parents and teachers and share the same Calasanctian educational vision.
Throughout our history as school, we have reflected on the best way to integrate the family into the school. In 2016, the institution considered the need to rethink the strategy, in order to better respond to the students needs, the new poverties and the new challenges and risk factors. Thus, a new proposal emerged with topics proposed by the different training areas and linking external experts in high-impact topics. We devised a new format that would transform the traditional parent schools into a “congress” type model.
This new format consists of:
- Read the reality to identify training needs
- Define the objectives and the methodology to achieve them.
- Identify the resources and logistics necessary to carry them out,
- Design a budget to make its execution feasible,
- Execute it
- Evaluate the plan to find opportunities for strategy growth each year.
Over the years, the strategy has been transformed, involving Piarist priests, educators, alumni, parents and even students of grade 11 as formation agents. During the pandemic, this methodology was assumed as a Province, moving from face-to-face to a virtual platform that favored the continuity of the formation of the family in the different Calasanctian works of Colombia and the participation of different actors of all communities and school works.
We are aware of the relevance of educational innovation for the sustainability of our Piarist MISSION. In the year 2023, the family integration committee composed with the presence of a parent, a student, a coexistence coordinator, the pastoral coordinator, the academic coordinator, a Piarist priest and the rectory, designed a methodology adapted to the life review method, which included the participation of parents, students and educators, seeking the sharing around the responsible and ethical use of technology.
This work culminated in a family congress that incorporated working groups by classroom and resulted in the design of a policy for the competent and safe use of technology, taking into consideration global reference frameworks, the contributions of all community stakeholders and the needs of children and youth according to their maturity and development.
This year 2024 marks the 8th anniversary of the family congresses where the formation of parents has been strengthened and the school-family pact has been renewed. Seeing the fruits of these congresses, we set ourselves new challenges:
- Recovering mass participation and face-to-face training,
- Deepen in sensitive topics such as mental health, technology addiction,
- Strengthening the link through the congresses.
- Methodologies such as open classroom, especially highlighting the commitment to consolidate ourselves as a Christian community that embraces from its essence the human and Christian formation of our students.
The Congress of the Calasanctian Family is an experience that has been sustained and transformed over time, has enabled the participation of different members of the community, seeks to respond to a permanent reading of reality and takes care of the charismatic foundations of our educational MISSION.
