About us

History

On April 12, 2016, the Cooperation Agreement was signed in Kikinda between Mihajlo Pupin Regional Talent Center from Pančevo and the City of Kikinda. The signatories of the agreement were Dr. Dragoljub Cucić, director of Pančevo Center and Pavle Markov, the then mayor of Kikinda. The Center was founded when Mihajlo Pupin RTC used the statutory right to establish branches in the region in which it operates (Banat). Systematic work with gifted students was stated as the purpose of establishing the Center in Kikinda. Srđan Srdić, at the time a doctoral student at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, but also a mentor in the scientific field of literature with ten years of experience and a series of notable results in the reviews of scientific research papers, was proposed as the director of the Center in Kikinda, which was confirmed by Mihajlo Pupin RTC. On July 16, 2016, Mr. Srdić fulfilled the principle requirement for the selection of directors of the Talent Centers, as he defended his doctoral thesis titled Relationships between reality and fiction in the prose of Jonathan Swift and thus obtained the highest level of professional degree.

Based on the agreement between Mihajlo Pupin RTC and the City of Kikinda, and at the insistence of Dr. Srdić and all the employees of Dušan Vasiljev RTC, student participation in all aspects of the Center's work is absolutely free. An agreement in principle was reached with the administration of Dušan Vasiljev Grammar School in Kikinda on the use of the school's premises and associated resources, which in practice proved to be an extremely efficient and cost-effective solution. In addition, Dušan Vasiljev Grammar School is the only school on the territory of the District that has continuously worked with Pančevo Center, as well as the Republic Talent Center. On October 27, 2016, the School Board of Dušan Vasiljev Grammar School in Kikinda gave its consent to the Agreement on Business Cooperation between Dušan Vasiljev Grammar School in Kikinda (represented by Ljubomir Zamurović) and Mihajlo Pupin Regional Talent Center in Natural and Technical Sciences  (represented by Dr. Dragoljub Cucić), based on the Agreement on Business Cooperation signed in Kikinda on April 12, 2016 by Dr. Dragoljub Cucić and Pavle Markov, mayor of Kikinda..

In a symbolic sense, the founder of Dušan Vasiljev RTC is Budimir Đukičin, a retired geography teacher, who joined Mihajlo Pupin RTC from Pančevo in 2000 as the first teacher from North Banat and later introduced his younger colleagues from Dušan Vasiljev Grammar School in Kikinda to work with gifted students. Budimir Đukičin has been a geography mentor at Dušan Vasiljev RTC since its inception and today is almost certainly the oldest mentor in the System of Regional Talent Centers of Serbia.