Over 30% elementary schools falling apart: Official

Yuli Tri Suwarni, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Director General for Elementary Education at the Ministry of Education Indradjati Sidi revealed on Monday that more than 30 percent of elementary schools were either ruined or in a state of irreversible decay.

He admitted that the decrepit state of the buildings was just one of the many problems plaguing the education system in the country.

Indradjati said that a large percentage of state elementary schools could no longer be used safely and all school activities had to be conducted outside because the government had not allocated the necessary funds to rebuild them.

He said the buildings could no longer be used, partly because of old age as they were built around 30 years ago, and partly because many were damaged in conflict zones like Aceh, Sulawesi and Maluku.

The number of elementary schools run by the government is 149,000, in urban and rural areas across the country.

"The government and the House of Representatives should give serious attention to this problem because this has made the elementary education problem more complicated. If the nation is committed to improving the quality of education in general in the future we need to do something," he said after inaugurating a training center for teachers in Bandung, West Java.

He said that the government had allocated Rp 625 billion in the 2004 state budget to rehabilitate the schools but the amount was far from enough so they would have to prioritize schools that could no longer be used and were located in densely-populated areas.

The government has said it would raise the education budget to 20 percent of the national budget as stipulated by the amended Constitution, but it has only allocated about one-fifth of that.

Hundreds of thousands of students in Aceh, Maluku and Central Sulawesi, have been studying in tents, mosques and churches since many of the schools have been razed during the various conflicts in those areas.

Maluku has sought financial assistance from foreign donors, including the European Union, to rebuild school buildings damaged during the 1999-2002 religious conflict that killed more than 6,000 people and displaced more than 750,000 others.

In Aceh, the martial law administration has begun rehabilitating more than 600 elementary and high schools which were burned down since President Megawati Soekarnoputri declared martial law on May 19, 2003.

Ki Supriyoko, a professor at the Sarjanawiyata Tamansiswa University in Yogyakarta, said last week that the poor condition of the school buildings was just one component of the pathetic state of education in the country.

The situation is not new because the country has had these problems since the country's independence in 1945, he said: "The real problem is that the nation has failed to devote serious attention to developing education."

Supriyoko said further that the state elementary schools had been also running short of educational facilities and teaching staff.

"Many of the teachers in elementary school are not permanent and many local administrations have deployed security personnel to teach students in elementary and high schools in remote areas," he said.