The municipality of Centar will again this school year provide free school uniforms for all pupils from first to ninth grade in its eight municipal primary schools. The measure was introduced last year and continues in 2026/2027.

Each pupil receives a set of five cotton items - two collared T-shirts, two long-sleeved collared shirts, and one zip-up sweatshirt. In addition, every first-grader enrolled in the eight schools also gets a free backpack.

Why this is not just clothing

Mayor Goran Gerasimovski explained the motive with a sentence that hits the real function of a uniform: „School should be a place where children differ by their knowledge, their effort and their success, not by what they wear and how much their parents can afford.”

The stated aim is to reduce social differences and to stop those differences becoming a reason for division or bullying.

Anyone who has been through primary school knows this is not an abstraction. The difference between a market T-shirt and a branded one is the first thing children notice about each other, and the fastest route to a split inside a class.

A measure that costs little and shows immediately

Five cotton items per pupil is not a capital investment. It cuts no ribbon, opens with no ceremony, appears on no billboard as a project worth millions.

But it is one of the few municipal measures whose effect is visible on the very day the school year begins, and one of the even fewer that directly reduces the household arithmetic before September - the month when the cost of school supplies, shoes and clothing lands all at once on every family with children.

The municipality says the measure will continue in the coming school years, with new cohorts receiving uniforms too.

The question that stays open

Eight schools in one municipality is a manageable scope. If the measure works - and the logic behind it is hard to dispute - the reasonable question is not whether Centar will keep going, but why other municipalities with similar budgets have not done the same.

The answer usually is not money. It is that uniforms do not photograph as well as a ribbon.