Concordia Public School

If you’re driving down the Bypass Road in Pookollai, you’ve likely seen our front gate at B/65. It’s a very busy stretch of road with lots of trucks and cars passing through at all hours. Concordia Public School sits right in the middle of all that noise and dust. Inside the walls, though, it’s a little quieter than you’d expect. We’ve got a small playground area where the kids try to play football, though the space is a bit tight for a full game. The building itself is older, painted a light color that we have to scrub down every single year after the monsoon rains stop. Our staff room is small and usually smells like strong coffee and old books. I’ve worked here for a long time now, and I’ve watched the road outside get wider and much busier every year. Most of our students come from the small houses tucked away behind the main road. They walk over or come on their cycles. We don’t have fancy school buses, just a couple of older vans that do the morning rounds. The classrooms have high ceilings which is a blessing when the weather gets humid. We spend a lot of our time fixing broken chairs or repainting the walls where the plaster peels. It’s a lot of constant maintenance work to keep an old place like this running properly. We just want the kids to have a decent place to sit and learn without too much extra fuss.