To take advantage of civil activity and community movement, which is gaining momentum worldwide, we believe that next decade is the very moment for democratic involvement of parents and students into the management of school and education in general. Parents are the key players in creating the environment for the child’s development. In order to participate in developing the school environment, the parent must take responsibility by participating in decision-making processes. Parents as decision makers must be educated and competent. Society needs a national education program for parents and other school board members, the keywords of which are communication skills (development and conflict management) and cooperation (collegial management). Estonian Parents' Association (EstPA) has been actively and systematically trained school boards since 2006 and practically all Estonian schools have been visited and altogether about 10,000 school community members have been trained. There have been met many school boards who are ready to take on more responsibility, as well as heads of schools and members of the local governments who would be willing to grant more rights to school board if they only knew how to do it correctly in terms of the laws and sustainability. Studies show that school leaders are often in a very difficult situation where each stakeholder (municipality, teachers, students and parents) demands their own and the principal’s preparation for a creative solution is not good enough. Therefore, our first task is to help school leaders to better implement the democratic governance model at school and at the same time prepare parents and the school board to unleash their potential. In this project are involved five schools from Saaremaa municipality, all together 1955 (60,1%) of all islands students. That means more than thousand families. Working together with principals and the local government, a systemic approach will be developed together with international group of scientists and other professionals. As an important part of the project, completely new school - Saaremaa State Gymnasium -will be developed based on two upper secondary schools in project. This process has so far been very arduous because neither school community wants to give up its long-standing tradition in local cultural life. The project promoters have undertaken their own mission of helping to create a third, the new culture in peaceful co-operation between the two communities and public at large, bringing as many young people as possible, who have gone to the mainland, to return to their home island later, to create a family. Thus, the project is not just aimed at giving the school board the right to make more decisions, but to create cooperative assumptions that directly affect the sustainability of local cultural life. One of the most important short-term goals of our project is to train a group of mentors-mediators who have the appropriate personal qualities and sufficient life experience to be prepared to create the prerequisites for a consciously focused peaceful transformation process in different school communities at different stages of development. However, if we look at the long term, then this project has impact on at least five levels - citizen, family, educational institution, local government and state level: 1. project will give the active parents and students an entirely new potential to be involved in the management of an educational institution and systematically improve their competence; 2. project involves more than thousand families and creates the prerequisites for the rapid growth of their communication skills and ability to cooperate - it will benefit the improvement of relations between different generations; 3. collegial management enables the inclusion of a larger number of competent people in the school life cycle; instead of power struggle, energy will go towards cooperation; 4. school board and principal together as community management team will become a trusted partner for local government; 5. at the national level, we dare to predict that the described process will create the necessary prerequisites for a formation of new generation of politicians who have contributed voluntarily to the community for many years and who understand local and educational life and are therefore able to establish and maintain productive relationships in a community-based way. To be honest, we believe that this project needs proper practical testing in Estonia and then distribution across Europe and elsewhere. Companies with no single decision makers are recognized with the Leadership Innovation Awards. That’s the reason we believe the idea of empowering the school boards to be a very timely and powerful tool for triggering change of management culture at grassroots level. From our point of view this is a peaceful way from learning organization to learning society.
We are of the opinion that the quality of leadership and relationships determines the quality of life of both the community and the country as a whole. We have realized that viable change starts at the grassroots level. We decided to write the project when the community movement, which had already raised its head vigorously in the world, also took the first bold steps in Estonia. We are very convinced that the quality of leadership in society can only change if the prerequisites for it are created at the family and community level. Kindergarten and school are just the right communities to learn and practice shared leadership. It is not possible to establish democracy in an authoritarian way. It must be born naturally, i.e., from the grassroots level. With the help of the project, we decided to create the prerequisites for the democratic leadership of schools to become an everyday phenomenon both in Estonia and elsewhere in Europe. At school, this means greater involvement of parents and pupils in the decision-making process. This presupposes that the school board, and parents in particular, are adequately prepared to intervene in management. Contributing to this preparation was the main objective of our project
Several members of the project's initiative group had been studying the issue of leadership for years and had come to the conclusion that the era of top-down authoritarian leadership was coming to an end. The increase in active citizenship was evident around the world. In Estonia, too, there were corresponding manifestations, but there were no practical skills on how to create the prerequisites for the peaceful introduction of shared management. The authoritarian model of leadership was so strongly entrenched both in education and in society as a whole that the creation of a viable alternative to it required the help of international institutions. The initiative group knew such institutions, but paying for their work required new sources. The search for such a source led to the Erasmus+ project. Professor Mika Risku, head of the Institute for Educational Management at the University of Jyväskylä, was the first to give kind consent to come to the rescue, and luck also smiled at the case of another partner, the Austrian, German-Swiss training company Trigon Entwicklungsberatung. The involvement of such reputable partners would have been virtually impossible without Erasmus financial support