Encouraging reading, providing safe interactions and games when returning to school during the pandemic and accompanying children and parents to avoid school dropouts are the main objectives of the projects developed by students from the Santos Dumont Institute (ISD) for the Santa Luzia Municipal School, the unique to the quilombola community of Capoeiras, in Macaíba/RN. The task of acting locally was proposed to the students of the Multiprofessional Residency in Health Care for People with Disabilities and the Master's Degree in Neuroengineering in the Education for Global Citizenship discipline, and the projects were presented this Wednesday (28) to teachers and school managers. 

The Santos Dumont Institute has been operating in Capoeiras, the largest quilombola community in Rio Grande do Norte, since 2015, when it started the Barriguda Project, providing prenatal and maternal and child care. “After our arrival here, which began with work in maternal and child health, we moved on to other social needs of the community. The Santa Luzia School is where our patients' children study, and this is one of the reasons why it is the setting for the execution of community-based education projects”, stated the general director of ISD, Reginaldo Freitas Júnior, who teaches the discipline . 

The students' mission was to identify needs and propose solutions for the school, which has around 120 Early Childhood Education and Elementary School students enrolled and suffers from structural problems, school dropouts and pedagogical deficiencies in the face of the pandemic. 

Three projects were developed by the students: the first of them proposed a mobile toy library for children along with a safety protocol for sanitizing each item according to the material, to avoid contamination by the coronavirus. “The idea came about when, on the first visit we made here, we identified that the children were not having interactive activities because of the pandemic, so we thought of games and strategies for them to be used, promoting interaction in a safe way”, explained the speech therapist and ISD resident, Mirelly Ferreira. Each box prepared by the students comes with a manual developed by the group, explaining all the hygiene protocols that must be followed by teachers depending on the toy's material.

Another group identified that students have experienced difficulties in literacy, and thought of the Refrigerator Library as a strategy to encourage reading, also with guidelines for using the books, which must undergo a four-day quarantine before being used again. “Our main idea was to bring something that encourages a love of reading, with a playful, interactive environment that attracts the child’s attention. When we arrived, some children already came here, looked at the books, we saw that it had already generated interest in some and that was the objective”, said speech therapist and ISD resident, Fernanda Varela. The books that make up the Refrigerator Library already installed at the school are the result of donations from students and employees of the Institute. 

Evasion 

Santa Luzia Municipal School has classes of students up to the fifth year of elementary school. After this series, students need to travel from Capoeiras to other neighboring communities or municipalities to continue studying. “The fact that they have to travel far away every day takes them away from their studies. This has caused students to stop studying after the fifth grade,” said physiotherapist and resident at the Institute, Thiago Araújo, part of the group that developed the Participa Project. “The project consists of specific support for students who will go through this transition, to explore students’ interests and demands and also make parents participate more actively in the school community and encourage their children not to give up on school life” , he said.

Transformations 

For Djane Santos, deputy director of Escola Municipal Santa Luzia, the projects developed by ISD students contribute both to the children's experience in the school community and to the work of teachers. “It is very gratifying that we are receiving these projects and we observe that some habits are changing in children, they are developing the habit of reading and studying more. Furthermore, today we are having face-to-face classes, but there are still some difficulties, such as the fact that students spend all their time in the classroom, so developing actions that make them learn through play, for example, are very important in this return” , reported. 

ISD and Capoeiras 

Since 2015, the Santos Dumont Institute has been developing the Barriguda Project in the largest Quilombola Community in Rio Grande do Norte through the Anita Garibaldi Health Education and Research Center (Anita). This is the Capoeira dos Negros community or Capoeiras, as it is better known, located in the municipality of Macaíba, and which has approximately 300 families with limited access to adequate health care, not yet covered by the Es team.Family Health strategy. 

Since 2020, the Institute's students have developed actions aimed at the Santa Luzia Municipal School and have carried out projects aimed at children in the community. One of them, developed by medical residency students, guaranteed children a type of sponsorship, which provided online tutoring classes for a period of one year, to meet the educational needs generated in the face of the pandemic.