Govt assures seats for all elementary school graduates

JAKARTA (JP): The city's junior high schools will be able to accommodate all elementary school graduates, a city official of the Ministry of Education and Culture has claimed.

Alwi Nurdin, the administration coordinator of the city office of the ministry, said yesterday that if all the elementary school pupils pass their final examinations thee would be 149,000 children looking for places in junior high schools.

"Meanwhile there are 150,000 seats in junior schools for the next academic year," he said.

The graduates also include those from the Moslem madrasah ibtidaiyah (elementary) schools.

Judging from this situation, "The government's compulsory nine-year education program will not be a problem," Alwi said during his visit to a number of schools where students were taking their final exams in physics and social sciences.

Outside

Antara quoted Alwi as saying that 10 percent of the junior school seats will be allocated to graduates from outside the city.

However these graduates are only entitled to apply to schools which are not on the city's list of best schools.

This year state junior schools will no longer need to hold their own tests for applicants, he said.

School staff only need to determine applicants by their final examination scores.

Alwi said he was sure this year will not see cases of parents being told to "buy" good scores to ensure junior schools accept their children, as was reported last year in West Java.

Supervision

"We will step up supervision" to prevent such practices, he said.

They would be impossible if examination checking is computerized, instead of by the current manual process, Alwi said.

Gito Purnomo, the city's head of the agency in charge of elementary education, said this was not yet possible.

"It is not a problem of funding. But we have yet to hold a trial for computerization of examination checking," Gito said.

The agency is still studying the benefits and disadvantages of computerized exam checking, he said.

The three-day state exams for the elementary level run until today. (anr)