Helmets and Bottles Join the Queue for Primary School Registration in Sukabumi

The dark, chilly dawn atmosphere on Jalan Raya Kota Sukabumi, West Java, was suddenly filled with parents wanting to register their children for primary school. Hundreds of parents were already crowded together, sitting on the pavement along the front of the iron gate, which was still tightly locked. Since 4 a.m. Western Indonesian Time, parents had been filling the area outside Sekolah Dasar Negeri Cipta Bina Mandiri (SDN CBM) Suryakencana in Sukabumi City to enrol their children. The long queue, dominated by mothers, snaked into the school’s surrounding grounds because the committee had limited the daily number of registrants. A unique sight was visible in the queue: water bottles (tumblers), books, document bags, and even motorcycle helmets were deliberately placed in neat rows on the asphalt by parents as placeholders and queue number markers. This was despite the school gate not being scheduled to open until 7:30 a.m. One prospective parent, Fitria, admitted she had braved the pre-dawn hours after learning a bitter lesson the previous day. On the first day of registration, she had to accept disappointment because she arrived late and the registration quota was already full. “My experience on the first day was not getting a number. So I tried coming at dawn, and it turned out at 4 a.m. people were already queuing. I arrived at half past four, and the system here is limited, they say, to only one hundred quotas per day. Now it is already the second day. We go to these lengths because this is a favourite school, so people know better and the quality of children is guaranteed here,” said Fitria. Echoing Fitria, the struggle to hunt for a primary school seat was also felt by Sandi Saepul Bakri. The man, who queued in the early hours, was willing to use his water bottle as a queue marker so he would not be displaced by other parents. “Yesterday on the first day I came at 7 a.m., but it turned out I didn’t get a spot because it was already rationed to 100 per day. So now I came earlier, at twenty-five to five in the morning,” said Sandi.