By Andreas Jagersberger | Corporate Fundraising, Philanthropy & CSR
During the winter semester 2018/19 (ranging from September 2018 to January 2019) the 54 Austrian-wide Lerncafés supported 1,950 children from educationally disadvantaged families, with a special focus on migrant families. Besides the professional employees, all with a pedagogic and educational background, around 780 dedicated volunteers supported the kids in doing homework, preparing for tests or reading together in order to further improve the German language and reading skills. We are especially happy about the expected success rate of our students: We assume that about 97 % of our students attending the Lerncafés will get a positive school certificate.
To give you a better insight what the support in the Lerncafés means for one specific student, we want to share an actual case study from a Lerncafé in Burgenland with you: Zahra (the beneficiary’s name was changed to protect her privacy) is a 12 years old girl from Afghanistan and attended the fourth grade of elementary school when she first visited the Lerncafé about a year ago. She is very hardworking and inquisitive. Despite her good cognitive abilities, Zahra had considerable problems in other school subjects due to her limited understanding of the German language. As a quick solution, the team of professional pedagogues and dedicated volunteers of the Lerncafé has created individual worksheets for Zahra in German and Math. The volunteer supporting the Lerncafé-students, a retired teacher, has studied German intensively three times a week in private lessons with Zahra, with an enormous and very gratifying success. The effective solo-sessions and her own progress with the German language aroused her interest in children's books massively and she even became a member of the local city library. Zahra’s vocabulary has been steadily growing ever since. In June 2018, she has graduated from the elementary school with positive notes in both math and German and was able to move on to the next schooling level, meaning the transition to NMS (new middle school). Since September 2018 Zahra is now attending the NMS, has way fewer problems as she can better understand the schoolwork and the tasks given. In mathematics, where she was unable to solve a problem on her own a few months ago, Zahra has now successfully passed her first tests of the new middle school and will finish the current winter semester 2018/19 only with positive grades in her school certificate.
In Austria the very well deserved one week semester break is just around the corner for our Lerncafé-students. We wish them all a great fun time with their friends and family and wish them the best of luck for the next semester!
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