Imam Mehdi School for Iraqi refugee children was established in 2002 by a number of Iraqi refugees residing in Qum. The school aims at providing an education to Iraqi refugee children who do not carry valid refugee documents and are therefore unable to sign up in Iranian public schools. This year, about half of Imam Mehdi (as) School's 633 students are from families who recently left Iraq to escape sectarian or ethnic violence.

Imam Mehdi School has a distinctly charitable character and requests only minimal fees. The school relies on donations to stay operative throughout the academic year. For this reason, children from the poorest refugee families sign up in this school. Many of them are orphaned or their fathers are chronically ill.  School fees aside, even purchasing stationery for several school students causes hardship for many families.

Despite their many difficulties, the students studying at Imam Mehdi (as) School continue to perform well. More than 90 percent of the students passed their exams at the end of the 2007-2008 academic year and about 25 percent were exempted from exams in one or several subjects due to continuously excellent performance throughout the year.

However, no student can study successfully without notebooks and pencils or ball pens. In order to enable the students to continue to perform well this year, IRAC distributed basic stationery items to all students. The tables below show the items received by each student according to his or her grade (table one), total numbers of distributed items (table two) and a breakdown of the project cost (table three).