Parent's committee

In Shkodra, we had our parents committee’ meeting/training. This was new to the project and we had these aims:

• Introduce them to the project and vice-versa
• Identify their priorities toward the school
• Invite them to participate in the project through projects of their own, in which they would contribute at least 5 % of the value monetarily or through volunteer work.

Around 40 parents showed up in the meeting. When we opened the floor for them to identify the problems that their children had at school, they mentioned the following:

• Overcrowded classrooms, around 50 pupils per class.
• Uninterested, underpaid teachers
• High unemployment amongst the parents, and hence poverty and bad home learning conditions for the pupils
• Lack of vocational help for the pupils who don’t go to university after the high school
• Constant power outages made anything, including studying difficult
• A school bus would be great for the pupils who live far from the school
• Non-existent chemistry and physics labs in the school
• Lack of heating in the school
• Lack of a school library for the required books
• Badly functioning computer lab
• Lack of contemporary methods of learning foreign languages (tapes and CD-s)