Paraphrasing an old African proverb that says, "It takes a village to raise a child", we can say that "it takes a local community to raise a school." The European Commission and policy makers in each country should enhance each local school, no matter of its size or location, to take ownership of the issues their local society is facing. In order to achieve this, strong and sustainable community connections and actions must be established. The whole local community engagement is the key and it can be achieved through parental collaboration, curriculum connected to real world experiences and solving local problems. To this end, the School Networks Alert Citizens protection project (SNAC) aims to help schools to become open hubs of innovation, education, training and information to their local society. A SNAC school plans and implements projects that increase the science capital of the local society. In our vision students projects are developing solutions for early warning systems, seismic activity monitoring and civic protection activities. Natural disasters and more specifically earthquakes causing great concern to the citizens mainly in the South Eastern Mediterranean basin, which has the highest seismic rate in Europe. It seems though that there is little knowledge on earthquake disaster prevention and mitigation in these countries. In this context, the SNAC project aims to set up a proof of concept experiment with the following major activities: A1-Management of the project, A2-Quality Monitoring and Assurance, A3-Development of Training Material & Data Platform, A4-Organization of National Induction Workshops, A5-School Implementation Activities, A6-Evaluation & Consolidation of Project Outcomes, A7-Dissemination Activity. Through these activities and their outputs, SNAC: (i) transforms schools to hubs of innovation and information about the seismic activity and the civic protection, that develop networks with local citizens and authorities, civilian protection agencies, research and science centres and other local stakeholders, (ii) develops and offers teachers and school heads comprehensive guides and proposes pedagogical practices based on inquiry-based methods that are more effective in science education (O1-Open Schooling Roadmap) as well as dedicated training through O2 (Training Programme for Teachers and School Heads), C1 (SNAC International Training Course) and the Induction and Hands-on Workshops (E1-E5) performed in each partner country, (iii) offers to teachers and school heads numerous engaging educational activities of STEM in which school students learn, practice and utilize themselves scientific instruments and methods while at the same time they have to communicate the outcomes of their work with the wider public (O2 - Training Programme for Teachers and School Heads), (iv) creates a dedicated database with an easy to use front-end to enable seismological data collection and presentation from the existing network of school seismometers all over Europe (O3 - Open Platform for Scientific Data), (v) maps the impact and effectiveness, both quantitatively and qualitatively, at student, teacher and school/institution level through O4 (Evaluation Methodology, Analysis of Results), (vi) guides and supports anyone interested in SNAC's results, through O5 (Recommendations for Future use), a guide, containing show cases, best practices and cases of achievements beyond expectations. (vii) connects with the eTwiining platform (see O6 - SNAC eTwinning toolkit) where all SNAC guides, databases and other resources will be uploaded in order to inspire the creation of innovative STEM projects and to build communities and networks of SNAC schools, starting from the teachers and students of the participating SNAC School Nodes and opening up to all European schools. The SNAC consortium is composed of 6 partners from 5 countries. All these countries have significant seismic activity, therefore their societies and their schools are having real interest in studying earthquakes as part of their science curriculum. The project builds on previous experience of all partners and the complementarity of their expertise. The Coordinator is the National Observatory of Athens, Institute of Geodynamics. P2 is Ellinogermaniki Agogi, involved in SNAC both as school entity and as training center for school teachers and teacher educators. P3 is the University of Cyprus, Department of Educational Sciences with long experience in development and implementation of teacher training and professional development programmes. P4 is IDIS, the Citta della Scienza/Science Museum in Napoli which as already established educational programs on earthquakes involving schools. P5 is the National Research Network Association from Bulgaria with long experience on providing support to schools on STEM subjects and P6 is he Dokuz Eylul University from Turkey, which provides research-oriented, creative and student-based education.
Paraphrasing an old African proverb that says, "It takes a village to raise a child", we can say that "it takes a local community to raise a school." The whole local community engagement is the key and it can be achieved through parental collaboration, curriculum connected to real world experiences and solving local problems. To this end, the School Networks Alert Citizens protection project (SNAC) managed to help schools to become open hubs of innovation, education, training and information to their local society. A SNAC school plans and implements projects that increase the science capital of the local society. We have seen students projects that are developing solutions for early warning systems, seismic activity monitoring and civic protection activities. These are documented in the Appendix of Intellectual Output 5. In this context, the SNAC project has set up a proof of concept experiment with the following major activities: A1-Management of the project, A2-Quality Monitoring and Assurance, A3-Development of Training Material & Data Platform, A4-Organization of National Induction Workshops, A5-School Implementation Activities, A6-Evaluation & Consolidation of Project Outcomes, A7-Dissemination Activity. Through these activities and their outputs, SNAC: (i) transformed 94 schools to hubs of innovation and information about the seismic activity and the civic protection, that develop networks with local citizens and authorities, civilian protection agencies, research and science centres and other local stakeholders. The core SNAC network consists of 202 and 4040 students, while 593 schools, 1196 teachers and 23930 students have been engaged with SNAC related activities during the duration of the project. (ii) developed and offered teachers and school heads comprehensive guides and proposed pedagogical practices based on inquiry-based methods that are more effective in science education (O1-Open Schooling Roadmap) as well as dedicated training through O2 (Training Programme for Teachers and School Heads) and the Induction and Hands-on Workshops (E1-E5) performed in each partner country, (iii) offered to teachers and school heads numerous engaging educational activities of STEM in which school students learned, practiced and utilized themselves scientific instruments and methods while at the same time they communicated the outcomes of their work with the wider public (O2 - Training Programme for Teachers and School Heads), (iv) created a dedicated database with an easy to use front-end to enable seismological data collection and presentation from the existing network of school seismometers all over Europe (O3 - Open Platform for Scientific Data), (v) mapped the impact and effectiveness, both quantitatively and qualitatively, at student, teacher and school/institution level through O4 (Evaluation Methodology, Analysis of Results), (vi) guided and supported anyone interested in SNAC's results, through O5 (Recommendations for Future use), a guide, containing show cases, best practices and cases of achievements beyond expectations. (vii) connected with eTwinning (see Appendix 6.1 of Intellectual Output 5 - SNAC eTwinning toolkit) where all SNAC guides, databases and other resources are presented in order to inspire the creation of innovative STEM projects and to build communities and networks of SNAC schools, starting from the teachers and students of the participating SNAC School Nodes and opening up to all European schools. The project was also invited to the eTwinning Annual Conference 2020 and will present a workshop at the 24th of October 2020. The SNAC consortium is composed of 6 partners from 5 countries. All these countries have significant seismic activity, therefore their societies and their schools are having real interest in studying earthquakes as part of their science curriculum. The project builded on previous experience of all partners and the complementarity of their expertise. The Coordinator is the National Observatory of Athens, Institute of Geodynamics. P2 is Ellinogermaniki Agogi, involved in SNAC both as school entity and as training center for school teachers and teacher educators. P3 is the University of Cyprus, Department of Educational Sciences with long experience in development and implementation of teacher training and professional development programmes. P4 is IDIS, the Citta della Scienza/Science Museum in Napoli which as already established educational programs on earthquakes involving schools. P5 is the National Research Network Association from Bulgaria with long experience on providing support to schools on STEM subjects and P6 is he Dokuz Eylul University from Turkey, which provides research-oriented, creative and student-based education.