About gymnasium

Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Lithuania

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PHILOSOPHY

Enter good, leave better.


VISION

Modern, of high quality, for all.


MISSION
To offer pupils lower secondary and upper secondary education, to prepare them for a future career, to develop a mature, civic-minded, socially responsible person.


VALUES
· Family
· Health
· Honesty
· Work/learning/knowledge
· Confidence/self-confidence.

   Our school opened its doors for the first time in 1971. This school used to be called secondary school No.4 but in 2003, after an accreditation procedure, the school became a gymnasium. At present 441 pupils attend the gymnasium. 43 educators  work with pupils at the gymnasium.

   After the renovation, which took place in 2009-2011, gymnasium became very nice-looking and cosy. Sports, athletics and hall were renovated as well as all the classrooms. Gymnasium’s stadium was also renewed and now it is very modern. However, our students have not only traditional lessons in the classroom at school but they are educated in other places. Some of geography lessons take place in meteorological station, in the company “Utenos Vandenys”, near the seaside or even in the Baltic Sea. Educational 3 days trip “The Baltic Sea. Stokholm” to Sweden by ferry for the students of the first gymnasium form or 3 days trip “Get to know Lithuanian seaside” for the second gymnasium form students are  geography lessons with other integrated subjects such as English, history, biology, ecology, math and others. During these educational trips our students not only gain academic knowledge but also develop various skills and experiences needed in real life.

   The gymnasium maintains the old school traditions and willingly creates new ones. Events in commemoration of state holidays, Gymnasium’s Birthday, the Equinox and the Solstice celebrations, sports celebrations, the Parties Study, Christmas and New Year’s events, the 100-days-until-exams celebration, the Chorus Wars, the Thanksgiving Day, the Fun Day and other events are held here every year.

   It is a real privilege to have such creative and active teachers and educational staff at the gymnasium, who encourage our pupils and prepare them to participate in various contests, academic olympiads and other competitions. Our pupils, together with geography teacher Ligita Pelikšienė and deputy director for academics Vida Adikliene, on more than one occasion have given the gymnasium a wonderful gift by winning first place in the nationwide competition “Euroscola”. It is a competition requiring pupils to know a lot. The competitionʼs prize is well worth the effort: the gymnasiumʼs team is invited to Strasbourg, with travel and living expenses paid by the European Parliament. So pupils have yet another excellent opportunity to learn in a different environment, not just sitting at a traditional desk in the gymnasium!

   In the contest of the best school of Lithuania 2016, organised by Santaka Valley, which is established in Kaunas University of Technology, Utena Dauniškis gymnasium was announced to be The School of the Year. The students of Utena Dauniškis gymnasium could not withhold the happiness of winning the award and receiving congratulations from  Prime Minister and the patron of the contest Algirdas Butkevičius. „People always hope to win if they partcipate in the contest, but this award is really special.We are amodern school with great Student Council, active students and perfect teachers.This award encourages to try even harder,“ they said.

   Utena Dauniškis Gymnasium was recognised as the gymnasium with the best results in the 2017 - 2020 Ambassador School Programme organised by the European Parliament Information Office in Lithuania.

   The Gymnasium’s boys’ basketball teams successfully compete in the Juventus basketball league, each year placing highly in the competition and becoming champions. In the 2019-2020  season, two of the Gymnasium’s teams made it to the finals and became the winners.

   In 2020, an agreement was signed with the European Social Fund Agency for the project Mathematical thinking for planning quality of life. This is a long-term project, funded by the European Social Fund. The goal of the project is to improve the mathematical achievements of pupils in the 10th class, by implementing an innovative model of support for the pupil orientated to planning quality of life based on mathematical thinking.

   We have carried out projects that have been recognised with eTwinning National Quality Labels and Pupil Quality Labels. The Gymnasium was also awarded the eTwinning School Label for 2020-2021.

   On World Teachers’ Day in 2021, the Utena District Municipality recognised geography teacher Ligita Pelikšienė with the Teacher of the Year Award.

   In 2020 and 2021, the association of Utena civic youth organisations, the Round Table, named the Gymnasium as Organisation of the Year, in recognition of its active and consistent efforts and achievements.

    In the Utena Youth Awards for 2022, Dauniškis won in the School of the Year category.

    I am happy that we, the teachers and the school leaders, realised some time ago,  that the development of a young person is no less important than conveying knowledge. A special attention in our gymnasium is paid not only to success in education of every student but also to good relationship among the members of the school community and developing moral values. We have been working hard  in order to achieve advancement in these spheres for some years, and this year we have been noticed and awarded in The Best School of the Year contest as a modern innovative, tolerance, cictizenship and sociality promoting school. Motto of gymnasium is „Enter good, leave  better“ and it proves that the most important virtue in our gymnasium is a man; every student is considered as a personality who has a lot of good features, abilities and talents which our teachers try to notice, reveal ( sometimes a young person does not even know about the talents hiding inside) as soon as possible and to create the most suitable conditions for every student to develop into a mature personality.

   Attention to the learning success of each and every pupil in the gymnasium became a particularly important topic several years ago, when we established classes called (Success for each and every pupil). The main purpose of this initiative was to individualise learning, that is, to cultivate not some kind of class or mass of pupils, but to cultivate each child, to create the best possible conditions for each pupil to discover his or her abilities and talents, to get to know each pupil and his or her learning style as well as possible, to help each pupil achieve the maximum results, taking into consideration the pupilʼs natural and learned abilities. At present, all of the gymnasiumʼs classes are Sėkmės kiekvienam classes, because all pupils coming to learn in our gymnasium want to learn in such classes and achieve learning success in this way. We try to involve parents (guardians) in the learning process as much as possible because they know their children best and together they and we wish the very best for our children and pupils.

   The main signs of our gymnasium communityʼs successful educational efforts are its results and the meaningful, memorable time our young people spend here. Both of these things, the formative educational process as well as its results, are of equal importance to us. Educational results to us are not just the final academic achievements, but also the maturity of personality, lifelong learning, a healthy self-confidence, the capacity to appropriately perceive reality and set learning goals for oneself, to accept new challenges as a path to self-improvement. The learning process and participation in the life of the school are just as important to character development as the formal educational process. Life in the school and learning converge as various activities, spaces and experiences intertwine. The gymnasium community values the experience and feelings of each pupil (being accepted and respected for who s/he is, being safe and secure, enjoying being at school and regarding the time spent here as meaningful), the spirit of community (unity, sharing, care and concern for others, helpfulness, commitment to others), self-government (discussion, initiation of decisions, acceptance and implementation, the ongoing creation of the schoolʼs life).

   For me, as the head of the gymnasium, it is especially a pleasure to see how all of this really happens in our community, and these are not just some nice words written in a plan. And for that I am very grateful to all the members of our gymnasium community: to the teachers, who with all their being are dedicated to cultivating young hearts and minds; to the pupils and their parents; to the other employees of the gymnasium, who through their daily activity make the gymnasium what it is today. Modern, communal, warm and cosy, ever-improving and seeking the success of every pupil!

 

Head master  Asta Skeirienė