Ness adolescencecenter is located in the county of Verdal in the middle of Norway. This year we are 28 children in the kindergarten, 65 pupils in the school and 22 grown-ups working here. The oldest part of the school is 101 years old so we have a long history.

The county of Verdal is an exciting county rich on history and local traditions.

Our kindergarten has children from 1 to 5 years old. There are 28 children using the kindergarten now, but no more than 18 per day. The kindergarten is open from 7.00am to 4.00pm. During the year we have activities with the children together with the children in school.

The school division is a primary school with grades 1 - 7. There are 65 pupils in 4 multigrade classes. They start when they are 6 years old, and because of the location of the kindergarten in the same house they already know both teachers and the other pupils. Our schoolday is divided in three 90 minutes periods with a long 40 minutes break and a short 15 minutes break. The day starts at 8.30am and ends at 2.00pm. Our youngest pupils, grade 1-4, leave school at 00.15pm. Not all the pupils leave school. About 20 of them stay at school in our SFO where they can stay until 4.00pm.

In our school we have done a lot of theatre-work. Every third year we do a play with all of our pupils involved. Last time, in 1998, we performed 5 times and had about 1100 people watching the play.

In our school we have had several businesses ran by the pupils. This year we have two ran by pupils in 7 grade. One of them, "Full Fræs", is making signs of wood, and it's the sixth year this business is going on. We have delivered signs all over Norway, and we have a couple of times exported signs to Sweden and Denmark.

In Norwegian schools we have a project called "The school and the pupils choice". Together with the parents we have this year chosen a local barrow area as theme. Everybody, teachers, pupils and parents, have learned about these barrows and old local grave customs. The youngest pupils, 1-4 grade, shall clean up the whole area, and the pupils in 5-7 grade will perform a self-written play using the barrows and their surroundings as stage.

For the next three years we have decided we'll develop our work in three areas.

1. Individualized education where we'll look to Swedish schools and their way of doing this.

2. Communication technology in practical use in school, and international projects like ours is part of this.

3. Environmentalism both physical and social, and improve using our local surroundings in this work.

During our co-operation project we'll hope to tell you all more about our work. We think we are a very exciting school