NEWS:  ACET Slovakia trains 3,000 teachers – now asked by the government to train 4,000 more

ACET Slovakia gathered together around 40 ACET Educators for a Central / Eastern European conference, with representatives from Slovakia, Croatia, Ukraine, Czech Republic and Russia. Delegates were encouraged by the extraordinary demand for sexual health and drugs prevention programmes across the region and the warm way in which schools and government officials have supported the work.

ACET Slovakia has been playing a central role in delivering the nation's sexual health policy in schools

ACET Slovakia has been chosen by the government to play a central role in sex education. Milan Presburger helped design the country’s new sex education syllabus. His team of volunteers from churches has trained teachers in over 3,000 schools, with plans to reach a further 4,000. The ACET Czech educator team have themselves reached over 100,000 pupils face-to-face. “We are planning events for 17,000 pupils in 6 cities in a single week using a big team later this year”, says Milan. “There was a great response to our first AIDS week in Nove Zamky. There is a huge open door for us right now.” Printed resources prepared by ACET have been made available by the government for thousands of teachers across the nation.

In the last 2 years they trained 2000 teachers of Ethics in HIV/AIDS. Bbeginning from September 2005 ACET Slovakia will continue to train the catechists of the Catholic Church (500-600 people). At the end of 2005 and in the beginning of 2006 they will train RE teachers in co-operation with the Methodical Centre (training department of the Ministry of the Education) and the Ecumenical Board of Churches.

Milan and Judy Presburger are both involved in ACET

ACET Slovakia is becoming regionally based with groups of educators in different cities responsible for their own schools bookings and administration. ACET Slovakia is seeking to encourage similar programmes in other nations such as Slovenia and Croatia.

Prevention - changing how pupils think and behave

Since January 2004 the ACET Slovakia team has visited 350 schools with 165,000 students, focusing on HIV/AIDS. After the presentation they were each given a questionnaire to fill out, to find out whether their opinions hadchanged on different issues such as: virginity, casual sexualelationships and transmission of HIV and AIDS illness. Young people wrote things like: "I will never take or try any drugs, I'm going to wait with sex until marriage, I want to be loved and not just used (abused), I am going to do anything in order to protect myself from HIV, etc". More than 8,000 pupils made these kinds of comments. Some pupils have been deeply affected and have made all kinds of long term changes in their lives as a result of these school visits. The teams are also involved in a wide range of youth projects, helping to reach those at high risk, those addicted to drugs and in other kinds of trouble.

ACET Slovakia has helped establish an Eastern European cluster (ACET: Ukraine , Russia , Slovenia , Croatia , Czech Republic and Slovakia ). This enables resources to be developed jointly and technical support to be given more easily by one project to another.

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