More students want to enter Jakarta schools

Theresia Sufa, The Jakarta Post/Bogor/Jakarta

After driving for two hours from his home in Cipondoh, Tangerang, Iman and his 14-year-old son Alfian wait their turn at a South Jakarta school to enroll.

There are 296 others ahead of them at the enrollment desk at SMU 70 high school.

"My son wanted to go to a popular school in Jakarta even though he had enrolled in one of the most favored schools in Tangerang," Iman said on Friday, without seeming to mind the trials of securing a place at a school for Alfian.

To ensure his son gets a good education in the capital city, Iman traveled back and forth between home and schools to pick up application forms and return them with all the necessary documents before his son was eventually accepted at a school in the capital.

That is, if Alfian's score is high enough for him to make it onto the school's shortlist, which will be announced on Monday.

Alfian is competing with students from among the 2,500 junior high school graduates from Bogor, Depok, Bekasi, Tangerang, Surabaya and Papua who want to experience the city's claimed quality education.

The number of enrollments from outside the capital for state senior high schools has almost doubled from the 1,400 applicants last year.

However, the Jakarta education agency only sets aside 5 percent, or 1,640 of its 32,000 placements at 115 state senior high schools for such applicants. The rest will have to vie with more than 40,000 applicants from Jakarta for school placements.

"People living in Greater Jakarta still believe that schools in the capital are of higher quality," Jakarta secondary and higher education agency head Margani Mustar said.

The city was in the country's top five provinces with a high junior and senior high school passing rate this year.

Apart from being impressed by Jakarta's education standards, parents like the fact that they can list four backup schools in the enrollment process, which started on July 6. "We feel less worried since we can list other schools in the process," said Sri Wuri, a residence of Tangerang.

"In Tangerang, Bekasi and other regencies we can only enroll in one school because all schools hold the selection test on the same day," she said.

Meanwhile, in Bogor, parents expressed concern that their children would be unable to enroll in the town's most popular junior high schools since the number of applicants from outside the regency town had also risen.

"We are worried that our children, having an average national examination score of only 40, will have no chance of entering popular schools," parent Ari Kamarudin said, adding that applicants from outside Bogor municipality apparently had higher scores that she claimed were unearned.

The concerned parents complained to the Bogor Council that a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed by education agencies in Bogor municipality and regency in May had prompted an increase in enrollments from Bogor regency.

Bogor secondary education agency head Aim Hermana said that the concerns were unfounded as more than 8,000 students had graduated from elementary schools in Bogor and had enrolled in state junior high school it the city and that only 508 applicants came from Bogor regency.

Nineteen state junior high schools in Bogor will accept 5,995 new students after taking into account final exam results.

"If their children are smart and have high scores, parents should not be concerned. It has nothing to do with the MOU, we have to treat all students, from the city and the regency, equally," he said.(003)