Teachers defend high school admission fees

JAKARTA (JP): State school bosses argued yesterday that the high admission fees for new students this year were being set purely to enable the schools to cope with the prolonged economic turmoil.

In interviews with The Jakarta Post yesterday, school principals and teachers urged the public, including parents and city officials, to appreciate that they were working with lilliputian levels of funding from the government.

People, they said, should also understand that the schools' reasons for hiking the fees were to meet teachers' welfare needs and to finance the increasingly high maintenance and running costs, such as buying stationery, that have soared in the wake of the rupiah's fall against the U.S. dollar.

The admission fees set last month by the city administration, Rp 33,500 (US$2.25) for junior high schools and Rp 38,500 for senior high schools, were obviously inadequate to finance the state schools' basic needs, they said.

"How can schools finance students' laboratory work and other extracurricular activities?," questioned Arief Rachman, the principal of SMUN 81 state senior high school, which is also known as Lab School.

The tariff set by the administration, he said, "was enough only for low-quality schools. Parents should be aware that they should strive for education as it's not for free."

He reiterated that education for children was not something which could be postponed even though the country was in an economic crisis.

"Education is like people's need for food," said Arief, who is also a noted education expert.

Ignorance

Most state schools in the capital have ignored the city administration's guidelines and are collecting an average of Rp 50,000 per student.

Arief's colleague M. Salim at SMPN 2 state junior high school in Karang Anyar, Central Jakarta, said: "So far, we have tightly limited our routine expenditure on, for instance, paper, electricity and water usage.

"How could we survive if students' participation is limited?"

Although city officials have repeatedly warned school managers not to hike fees beyond the level set by the government, many schools see no alternative way to resolve their dilemma.

On Monday, the head of the city education and culture office, Alwi Nurdin, revealed that his office had questioned at least 50 state school principals for allegedly overcharging students.

Four of them would be demoted to ordinary teachers, he said.

Deputy Governor for Social Welfare Affairs Djailani said last week that schools were forbidden to collect fees for uniforms, buildings and so on from students in an attempt to halt the increasing number of unschooled children and drop-outs.

But parents yesterday were still complaining about the attitude of some state schools.

Nuriah, in her 40s, said that she was asked to pay Rp 230,000 by a teacher at SMPN 08 state junior high school in Central Jakarta for her child's admission fees and uniform.

"I heard that state schools are forbidden to organize the supply of student uniforms but the teacher told me that if I bought the uniforms elsewhere, the color might be different," said Nuriah, who finally had to borrow money from her neighbors to pay the charges. (ind)