IISJ parents elect new committee

The International Indian School-Jeddah (IISJ) has a new managing committee. It will be chaired by Haroon Rasheed.
Rasheed, from Bihar, won the highest number of votes (835) in a well-organized election that saw 942 parents casting their votes.
The other six victors in yesterday’s elections were Ahmed Najeeb Hashmi (UP, 781 votes), Abdul Aziz Amanullah Chogle (Maharashtra, 775), Mohammed Mahboob Ali (Andhra Pradesh, 731), Mohammed Raziq Abdul Vahid (Kerala, 722), Mohammed Ilyas Momin (Karnataka, 713) and Mohammed Hyder Ali Qureshi (Andhra Pradesh, 665).
The remaining two candidates, Khaliq Sayeed, from West Bengal, received 629 votes and Sebastian Kakkamattil Mathew, from Kerala, 533 votes.
Polling began at 9 a.m. yesterday with only a few voters turning but after 1 p.m., voting gained momentum with a large number of parents, including women, turning up to cast their votes.
A total of 10 polling stations were set up with an equal number of voter verification counters in the auditorium. Voters were allowed to cast their votes only after proper ID verification through iqamas and the latest fee receipts.
Khaled Al-Ghamdi of the Ministry of Education, Raghib Quraishi, senior diplomat at the Indian Consulate and observer for the school and Election Commissioner and Principal Syed Masood Ahmed were present in the polling area with Al-Ghamdi randomly checking various polling stations and the process.
Indian Consul General Faiz Ahmed Kidwai also visited the school to see the polling process.
Stating that it was a great moment for parents who had the opportunity to make a choice, Syed Masood Ahmed said: “The electoral exercise has been a great success.”
The new managing committee members said they have outlined a basic plan for the development of IISJ’s infrastructure to accommodate more students and improve academic standard.
“Our main focus will be on improving the quality of education,” Abdul Vahid told Arab News after he was declared elected.
He said the new team would work for achieving greater transparency, reducing teacher-student ratio from 65 to 40 and constructing a new building.
“Providing coaching to students who want to take entrance exams is another priority,” he said. “We’ll see how much the coaching program will cost and whether it would be affordable to parents.”
Another winner, Ilyas Momin, described the election arrangement as “excellent.” The school had deployed about 100 staff members to organize the poll. “We’ll study the various problems of the school to find suitable solutions,” he said.
“Lack of seats is one of the main concerns. Every year, 60 percent of applicants do not find seats and they have to look for other schools, where fees are high,” Momin said.
He emphasized the need for allocating a certain quota of seats for parents who earn low salaries.