This paper presents the development of a photovoltaic (PV) system to supply electric energy to a typical rural school in the countryside of the sunny Northern East of Brazil. The system is designed to supply a rural school for up to two days, even under minimum solar radiation conditions. The solar energy is captured by PV panels and stored in lead acid batteries. The solar battery charger (A boost converter) extracts the maximum power from the PV panels for any radiation. The load is supplied through a high gain boost converter (24 Vcc to 311 Vcc) and the entire system is controlled by a microcontroller, which runs the MPP algorithm, monitors the charge state of the batteries and controls the operation of the DC/DC boost converter according to the load demand.