The parent teacher association meeting is open to every family. On the agenda: the canteen price, the uniform shelf, and a hundred books for the library.
The parent teacher association meets on the first Sunday of the month at eight in the evening in the hall. It is open to every family with a child in this school and nobody needs to be a member of anything to attend or to speak.
Three things are on the agenda and all three are the association's own business rather than the school's, which is worth saying because families often bring them to the office instead.
The canteen price. A plate has been ten rufiyaa for four years and the association is being asked to decide whether it stays there. The cost of what goes into it has plainly risen. The association's own view, as we understand it, is that the price should hold and the plate should get slightly smaller rather than the price moving to fifteen, because ten rufiyaa is a coin a child can be given. That is a decision for the meeting and not for the school.
The uniform shelf. It moved about forty sets last year and it is short of shirts for the middle grades and of shoes in every size. If your child has outgrown anything in good condition, leave it on the shelf rather than keeping it for a cousin who may not need it. Nothing on that shelf is recorded and nobody who takes from it is asked a question, which is how it has always worked and how it will stay.
Books. The association buys about a hundred books a year for the library and the librarian's request this year is specific: books in Dhivehi for children over ten. There are very few of them, they are expensive, and anybody who knows where to get them should come to the meeting and say so.
One note from the school rather than the association. The canteen, the shelf and the book stall are run by parents, the money is theirs, and they report at their own meetings. The school provides the room and keeps out of it, deliberately. If you want a say in any of the three, the first Sunday is where to have it.
