About Solkan - features of the environment

Solkan was first mentioned in written historical sources in 1001, so in the year 2001 we celebrated its thousand-year anniversary. Although the town was almost razed to the ground during the First World War it managed to preserve some of its ancient heritage. Some of the houses, formerly owned by respected and wealthy townspeople of Gorica, have given the area its own charm.

Joinery was a flourishing trade here from the middle of the 19th century onwards and the joiners of Solkan were held in high esteem right up to the 1950s. Nowadays the trade is dying out. Due to the energy provided by the beautiful river Soča, industry began to appear in Solkan. Nowadays the valley of the wild Alpine river Soča provides opportunities for tourism and kayaking, too. 

About the school

Our school has a long tradition. It was established 145 years ago. Despite the fact that the school is old our main aim is to use modern contemporary technologies in educational process and give students the opportunity to communicate with the world. The school district is quite big, so our students come from not only Solkan, but also from most of the villages on the nearest Banjška and Trnovska plateaus.

Our school has also two branch-schools, one in Grgar and the other in Trnovo, but there are only first four classes of elementary school with pupils aged from 7 - 10. Each school has its own kindergarten section, too.

There are about 600 students in 28 classes from class 1 to class 8 aged from 7 to 14 altogether and 7 groups with about 120 children in the three kindergartens. 95 people are employed at our school.

In 1976 a new wing of the school was built and from then on we have better working conditions and we are also given more possibilities for different cultural, sports and other events. In 2001 we also added a new part of the building providing better conditions for new coming nine-year long Primary school in 2003/04.

School logo

More than ten years ago a school logo was chosen, that is the former logo of the Solkan local community was given to us while the local community chose a new one which celebrates the year 1001 when the town Solkan was first mentioned in written sources.

Our headmaster is Mr Kogoj Marijan and vice-headmistress Ms Šebenik Ida accompanied by 47 teachers and 14 nurses in kindergartens.

School location

We are lucky for our school is located in calm and green neighbourhood on the margin of the small town Solkan in the middle of a big meadow. If we try to depict our location then we should say that it lies, among houses in the shelter of a small green hill Kekec which offers students (sport days) and people from the town a nice place for recreation and mountaineering. There are also mountains called Sveta gora and Sabotin close to our school which are very convenient for our sport days and our researches of the forest. Close to our building there is our beautiful Soča river (with a big railway stone bridge) where our school kayak champions compete and train. Fertile fields and smaller vineyards that lie less than a kilometre away from our school, absorbs the noise of the nearest town Nova Gorica and invite our students and teachers to learn in nature.

We speak Slovenian - our mother tongue, while our students start learning English at the age of 9 (class 3) and of course many of them know a little bit of Italian as they watch Italian TV programs, listen to their popular songs, read Italian comics and often go to Italy.

Our school is one of the schools involved in the national project called Computer literacy (RO) organised by Ministry of Education and is one of the best equipped schools with ICT in our region and even wider. We started using small computers as Spectrum almost 20 years ago and had lessons of Basic with groups of students which was a kind of the beginning of informatisation of the school. Year 1992 was a turning-point for us as we joined the Petra project - the so called Computer literacy project in Slovenia for grades 5. In 1994 we were chosen as a central school for using computers at geography lessons in Slovenia. After two years we became also a regional teacher training centre for computer literacy. Today we have two well equipped computer rooms with the internet access - one for geography and one for general use, a specially equipped English classroom with all the necessary equipment for using CD-ROMs and internet in teaching English and one computer in Slovene, chemistry, music classrooms, (first computers were funded 50% by Ministry of education and 50% by local community and so we got our first computer room, from last year on cca. 70 school computers are connected into a school net). There are now about 70 computers with internet access in our school and most of the teachers use them when teaching or preparing for the lessons.