Following the meeting, Harry returned to his quarters and sat down behind his desk.
Now that the issue regarding the second fifth year Slytherin prefect was sorted out, he was left with only one other job for his weekend. Unfortunately it was a monumental task that would most likely take up the majority of the rest of the weekend, several hours during the evenings of the upcoming week and most of the following weekend too.
That task was, of course, dealing with the suggestion boxes.
At the time they had seemed like a brilliant idea, but now that he was faced with sorting through each box and trying to come up with ways to deal with each issue that arose, he was regretting the decision to do it.
Worse was the fact that he could not try and get any of the prefects to help him. He was well aware that there could be complaints against any of the prefects in these boxes, and it would not do to have them discover a piece of parchment containing such a complaint.
Nor could he acquire the assistance of a teacher for the same reasons.
He would have to sort through it all himself and if anything came up that required the attention of a prefect or a teacher, then he would sort it out.
Harry picked up the first box and tapped his wand on the lid to open it. Then he reached in, took out one of the pieces of parchment contained within and unfolded it.
He paled slightly. This one piece of parchment alone contained sixteen different issues.
Realising that he would need a way to organise this he looked around the room to try and get some kind of idea. One hit him almost instantly.
The back wall of the room was entirely bare, containing no portraits, windows or shelves. It was the perfect place to organise things.
Picking up his wand he approached the wall, which was rather smooth for a Hogwarts wall, and began casting spells that changed the wall from a dark grey to a snowy white. He had to cast the colour changing spell multiple times in order to get the effect that he wanted, but in the end he had it.
A giant white board.
Carefully he then used his wand to draw a thick black line down the centre of the wall, effectively dividing it into two halves. With more careful wand work, he wrote, again in black, ink, the word "Complaints" at the top of the left hand side of the wall. Then at the top of the right hand side of the wall he wrote "Suggestions."
He then divided the complaints half of the wall into four parts, the first being for complaints against teachers and other staff, the second part for complaints against prefects, the third for complaints against other students and the fourth for complaints against the school in general.
Without reading any suggestions, he didn't know how best to divide that side of the wall just yet and so he left it until he could get some kind of idea as to how to go about it.
He returned to his desk and picked up the first sheet of parchment once again. Again using his wand, he cut the parchment into smaller pieces, one piece for each issue that the writer had raised. Then he picked up each piece and carried them over to the wall where he began to read them.
The first issue read: Snape is biased towards the Slytherin students and gives them house points for no reason and takes house points from others for no reason.
Harry nodded his head in full agreement with this statement. He pressed the piece of parchment against the wall in the section for complaints against teachers and staff then used his wand to stick it there.
The second piece of parchment read: He once gave me a detention for being twenty seconds late, but when a Slytherin turned up five minutes later he didn't say anything.
Harry sighed. Again this was all too true and he stuck it to the wall just below the previous one.
The next five issues were all complaints about Snape, something which led Harry to suspect that before long he would have to further divide the area for complaints against teachers and staff onto "Snape" and "Other."
The next complaint was against Mr Filch, the caretaker, and suggested that he was not of a suitable mentality to work around children. The one after that was a complaint against Professor McGonagall, accusing her of favouring the Gryffindors too much.
The tenth issue raised was actually a suggestion, one that Harry, personally, thought was a very good one. It read: The library in the castle contains hardly any works of fiction. Some of us like to unwind with a good bit of Sci-Fi or a fluffy romance novel.
Harry now suspected that this student was most likely a Muggle born. He thought about the suggestion for more fictional books for a few moments before creating his first sub-section in the half of the wall for suggestions. At the top of the section he wrote "Suggestions for leisure activities" and stuck the piece of parchment beneath it.
The next complaint read: We never go on any school trips. It would be really nice to visit places like the Ministry of Magic and Godric's Hollow or to get a look behind the scenes of a Quidditch stadium or the place where they brew butter beer. It would help us get a better appreciation for the world.
Again Harry found himself agreeing and created a second subjection of suggestions, this one being titled "Ideas for improvement of education."
The next suggestion went into the same sub-section as it suggested that the school get in special guest lecturers, either as a supplement for what they were studying or to inform the students about subjects that were not usually on the school curriculum.
.....
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