School Hunt (Part two)

After some survey that was discussed in first School Hunt post, finally I chose "Rosans Islamic School" for my daughter.

Below is my first email to school administration after first week. This is quite old now. I must say that I got good response from administration. They called me for meeting and addressed all my concerns.

Assalam o Alaikum:

I hope you are fine and doing well. My name is Taimoor Mirza and I am father of XX who has recently joined your school in grade 1. We have recently moved from Bahria town and one of the reason of this move was to send my child to some better school that also provides Islamic environment to children. I am quite happy with the school so far. Below are few suggestions that are based on my one week's experience with Rosans:

1. Daily bag size

I was surprised to see the number of books that Grade 1 child has to carry every day. My kiddo is 6 years old and her weight is about 16 kg. Its very difficult for her to daily carry a bag with 13 books, 5 notebooks, one diary and a lunch box. She twice told me that her class is at first floor and she was about to fell down while bringing the bag down.

Isn't it possible to keep some of these books at school and only send few of them back?

2. Communication b/w teacher and parents

Currently there is no way (that I am aware of) to communicate with class teacher. We want to ask teacher various things about course, books, any missing book e.t.c.

In Bahria town school, teachers normally write such notes on student's diary and that diary was used as mode of communication. We are currently sending most of the books to School daily but my daughter still tells me everyday that teacher asked for some book that she did not have. Can you kindly ask teacher to write such things on student's diary so that we know exactly what book is it?

3. School leaving procedure

In Bahria town school they had their own bus transport service that includes driver, assistant and a maid. Teacher brings children to gate and maids then make sure that no child is missing. Its maid's responsibility to hand over child to parents. If parents are not at home, they call at their cell number and then take child back to School from where parents can collect him.

I can understand that such service is not possible in Rosans but I think process of collecting child can be improved. Currently, most of public transport service drivers are gathered at the gate and every driver has around 5-10 children to collect. They kept on chanting children names in full voice and its very difficult for anyone to pierce through their circle and tell gatekeeper name of  child.

One thing that can be done is that all these drivers provide a paper with names written on it to the guard and then stay away from the gate. Aaya G can then go through that list by calling names of every individual child.

4. No SMS/Email Notification from School

It happened with me last week when there was heavy rain in Lahore. It took me about an hour to reach Rosasn from Defence and at times, my car was about to die in pool of water. But after reaching School, I came to know that School is closed because of heavy rain. Its my humble request to kindly send some SMS or email notifications to let parents know about it. That'll really be very helpful for parents.

These are just few things that I have observed. Kindly don't take it as a criticism. I am not doing comparison of Rosans and Bahria town school. If I have moved my child from Bahria town school to  Rosans then its because I believe Rosans is a much better place for my child's grooming, character building and becoming good human.

Thanks and Jazak Allah,

Few other things that I learned from school switching experience.

1. Infrastructure of School
• I did not realize it initially but my daughter told me that she misses large playgrounds and kids playing areas of Bahria School.
2. Extra curricular Activities
• Rosans school focuses a lot on academics. They have CAT (continuous Assessment test) and child is always under a bit of burden. But with all this, they have no extra curricular activities.