The High School of Camilo Castelo Branco received this Wednesday the homologation for the integration in the National Schools Network UAARE (Support Unit to High Performance at School) and is a reference school in the municipality of Vila Nova de Famalicão - and even from neighbouring municipalities - to receive students who are, at the same time, high performance athletes and who intend to conciliate, with success, the school activity with the sports practice.
This classification will allow the school to have a set of teachers to monitor the students, to manage in a flexible way the curriculum and schedules, adapting them to the context of training and competition.
At the ceremony, the National Coordinator of UAARE Schools Victor Pardal, praised the role of the City Council "when three years ago, by the now mayor and then councillor for sports, asked us about the procedure for the integration of one of these units in the municipality, in order to enhance sports development without the students losing school performance, in a strategic vision that allowed us, with the school, to create a set of conditions to be here today celebrating the homologation of the application".
The approval, dated June 22 of 2022, was made by the Secretary of State for Education, António Leite, and by the Secretary of State for Youth and Sport, João Paulo Correia, but the Director of Camilo Castelo Branco Secondary School, Carlos Teixeira, explained that the unit "is already working externally and that in the last year, 39 students were integrated in individual curricular plans adapted to the demands of high competition sport", highlighting the merit of the programme with the fact that "19 of these students are board of excellence and the remaining ones integrate the school merit board".
The City Council of Vila Nova de Famalicão supported the school's application, by equipping the UAARE's support study room with about 20 thousand euros, and plays a facilitating role in the process "and we continue to do so, by passing information to clubs and parents about the potential of the project, which joins resources and legal framework, to facilitate the conciliation between the practice of sports and school performance" said Pedro Oliveira, councillor for Sports, seconded by the councillor for Education Augusto Lima who classified the unit "to enhance talent".
The High School Camilo Castelo Branco was the best classified in the application process, one of the 6 validated for the next school year, in a total of 25 schools throughout the country that have this support for students who are also top competition athletes.