More students want to enter Jakarta schools

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)