Butel municipality will give every first-grader an ergonomic backpack with school supplies and a school uniform. Gjorče Petrov municipality will hand out 410 backpacks with supplies, a free school snack and 3,000 denars in one-off financial support. Both are announcing this as an investment in the future of their youngest.

And both are right - for a parent who receives the package, this is real money that stays in the pocket. It is just worth looking at what the whole picture means when you set one municipality beside the other.

Nine thousand denars, if you live in Butel

Butel mayor Darko Kostovski also announced the figure. The school package together with the uniform amounts to a saving of around 9,000 denars for every family with a first-grader this year.

"This year too, all first-graders will receive a high-quality ergonomic backpack on 1 September with the school supplies they need for a smooth start to the school year," Kostovski said. The package contains a number-learning aid, a pad, coloured pencils, felt-tips, plasticine, pencils, a notebook, a sharpener and an eraser.

Nine thousand denars is not a symbolic sum. It is the upper end of what fully kitting out a first-grader costs.

Three thousand denars, if you live in Gjorče Petrov

In Gjorče Petrov the model is different. Mayor Aleksandar Stojkoski announced that the municipality has secured 410 free ergonomic backpacks with school supplies, a free school snack, and 3,000 denars in one-off financial support for every first-grader after the school year starts.

"Together with our friends from the Rosica kindergarten - the future first-graders - we chose the ergonomic backpacks and the school supplies every child will receive at the start of their school journey," Stojkoski said.

There is one detail here worth noting: 410 first-graders in the whole of Gjorče Petrov municipality. That is the number sitting underneath every conversation about demographics - one Skopje municipality, one cohort, four hundred and ten children.

The package depends on the postcode

And here is what neither of these statements says. A uniform and supplies in Butel. Money and a snack in Gjorče Petrov. In some third municipality - perhaps nothing, or less.

Both measures are financed from the municipal budget, which means their scale depends on how much the municipality collects and how much it sets aside. A municipality with a stronger tax base can do more. A municipality dragging debts can do nothing.

Primary education in this country is compulsory and free - that is both a constitutional and a statutory matter, and the education minister repeats it regularly. But "free" means the teaching is not paid for. The backpack, the supplies, the uniform and the snack are paid for, and they come out of the family budget everywhere the municipality has not stepped in.

When the starting line on 1 September depends on which municipality a child is enrolled in, that is not unfairness on the part of the municipalities - they are doing more than they have to. It is a gap in the system that municipalities cover as far as they can, and where they cannot, nobody else covers it.