Our school, Kempele Junior High School, is located in Kempele, which is a fast growing suburban kind of municipality with some fifteen thousand inhabitants. Kempele is situated northern Finland, 15 kilometres south of Oulu and about 250 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. Being the only junior high scool in the municipality, our school is rather big. We have some 760 pupils and 80 teachers and other members of staff.
The following subjects are taught in our school as obligatory subjects:
Mother tongue, Swedish, English, maths, science, chemistry, biology, geography, automatic data processing, religion, history, arts, music, home economics, physical education, textile work and technical work (including woodwork). As optional subjects our pupils can choose some extra courses from the following: drama, international studies, law studies and economical studies. They can also choose some extra courses on physical education, home economics, arts, music, physical education, English, textile work and technical work.
The pupils in our school are from 13 to 17 years of age. They go to grades seven to ten. In order to get to the following grade each pupil must pass all the courses given each year. On each grade there is a group that has an emphasis on mathematics and natural sciences. On the seventh and eighth grade we also have a group with an emphasis on business. However, our task is to give good basic education to all our pupils. And our most important goal is to succeed in this.
There are six teams in our school that take care of the issues important to the whole school. Each teacher belongs to one of the teams. The issues the teams work with are: international issues, co-operation between homes and the school, common didactics, school festivities, sustainable development and issues connected to rating.
An important goal for our school is having varied international relations. With this we are willing to raise our pupils to become tolerant and open-minded. We have partner schools in the following countries: Sweden, Russia, Estonia, Germany, Czech Republic, Greece, Kenya and India. We try to keep in touch with all of these schools and are ready to participate in various co-operation projects with them; for example, so far we have had mutual pupil exchange projects with the partner schools from Russia, Greece, Sweden and Germany.