The Tanzanian school system is based on the British school
system, so how things work is easier to understand if you’ve read Harry
Potter. We have prefects and a Head
Prefect (like the Head Boy and Head Girl in the books, except we only have one
as the school isn’t that big.) Instead
of having a certain number of prefects for each year, though, we have prefects
for various specific duties. There are
the social life prefects, student health prefect and assistant (in charge of
helping the school nurse and dispensing basic first aid requests such as
bandaids and Tylenol), academic prefects (basically study hall monitors extraordinaire),
sports prefects, dorm prefects (like R.A.s), etc. Also unlike the Harry Potter books, these positions
are not assigned, but elected. The
students do have to return an application and a letter explaining why they want
to be a prefect to the teachers ahead of a time; this discourages snap decisions
to run and allows the teachers overseeing the process to weed out the students
that truly should not be given leadership responsibilities or whose grades are
too low to be able to handle the extra time they would need to commit. After the applications are reviewed, a list of
candidates for each position is posted, and the hopeful students have a week to
campaign for votes.
Today is election day; before the vote, each candidate has about
four minutes to come up and make a short speech and answer any questions. I went up for a few minutes to hear a few
speeches but didn’t stay for all of them or for the actual voting. The results will be posted tomorrow!
Edit: I don’t want to make a separate post, but I did want
to say that Meleji, a Form 3 student, is our new Head Prefect. He will be the third Head Prefect in the
history of our school (only just now starting its fourth year). I hope he will grow to be a capable leader
and a good influence on his fellow students.
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