The poor still waiting for government assistance

Oyos Saroso H.N., The Jakarta Post, Bandarlampung

Karti is worried. It has been almost a month since the government raised fuel prices, but she still has not heard when, or if, her two children, a sixth grader and a third grader, will get their school fees paid for, as promised.

Her children quit school three months ago because the family was unwilling to the pay their fees. They are too embarrassed to show up at school now. Their mother could not afford to pay the re-registration fee for them -- Rp 150,000 (US$16.6) per student.

"If the school fee waiver is going to be given to poor families like ours, I hope my two children get it. But according to the school principal, I have to be patient, because the school has not received the money yet," explained the resident of Sumurbatu, Telukbetung Utara.

"I've asked the principal, but even he did not know when the money will reach the school so my children can't go back to school yet," she added.

For the 40-year-old woman, who earns money doing laundry for her neighbors, the government's promise is very important. If her two youngest children get the assistance, it would a blessing for her family's future. Her eldest dropped out of school years ago and now has little future.

"My eldest had to dropout of school. He's now a pedicab driver in Tanjungkarang," said Karti, who was widowed five years ago.

Great expectations also can be seen in Udin's face. A week after learning about the promised school assistance program, the repair shop worker went to his son's school. Unfortunately, the school also had no idea when the funds would arrive.

"One of my children has already dropped out of school. I don't want my other child, who is a fourth grader, to experience the same thing," said the resident of Gulak-Galik, Telukbetung Utara.

Like Karti and Udin, hundreds of other poor parents have the same hope.

But hope remains just that until the government's promise is fulfilled. There remains a lack of information on how to get the assistance fund for the poor, and most school administrations claim to be equally in the dark.

Officials at the Lampung provincial education office, however, claim to be experiencing difficulties in disbursing the school funds, apparently due to an inability to work out how they can prevent overlap with other assistance funds for the poor.

According to the education office data, there were 140,000 elementary school students who might have to drop out because their families cannot afford the fees.

Deputy head of the education office, Adeham, said there were around a million of elementary school students in Lampung, of which 26 percent or 260,000 of them come from poor families.

"From that number, only 120,000 of them can receive assistance from the Rp 20 billion allocated from the provincial budget. Each student costs, on average, Rp 160,000 per year. But there are 140,000 more students who need assistance," he said.

Adeham said the number of poor students might increase since the new fuel prices would lower many families' purchasing power. "The 140,000 figure was calculated before the fuel price hikes. We're sure the number will rise by 10 percent," Adeham deduced.

Head of the Bandarlampung municipal education office, Zaini Nurman, asked the schools to involve the community in finding students who deserved to receive assistance, so that the program will reach its target group.

"We ask schools to involve school committees and the local community in finding students who deserve to receive the school fee waiver," Zaini said.

However, he added that it would be handled by homeroom teachers as they know which students are poor. Names of the selected students will later be announced at each school.

The data should then be handed over to the education office to prevent overlap with other aid programs, he added.

"We hope schools will quickly register the poor students," Zaini said.

Secretary of the Indonesian Teachers Dignity Forum in Lampung, Gino Vanoli, warned that the lack of information and the absence of an independent monitoring team might open up the possibility of embezzlement of the assistance money for the poor.

He said that so far, a lot of money from the Lampung administration had been disbursed to schools for poor students.

"But in reality, many students still had to dropout because they did not get the money. We've discovered many leakages," Gino lamented.

Another education financial assistance program in the recent past, was one that allocated Rp 14 billion for junior high school students. But it also failed to reach its target, Gino added.

"From the planned Rp 1 million per year per student, the students only received Rp 500,000 and the rest went to the school," Gino said.

In Lampung, the funds made available by the central government for the poverty assistance program after the fuel subsidy cut, will be handled by Lampung University, which is responsible for distributing the money and preparing a monitoring team.

The university president, Muhajir Utomo, said they had been notified of the plan to distribute the school funds, but he had no idea when the funds would be given or how much they were going to have to disburse.

He said the monitoring team would involve lecturers, students and staff. Unlike the tasks of the financial and development audit agency, the team's tasks will be more administrative -- they will work on compiling data on Lampung's poor residents. Then, the university will report on whether the money was used properly.

Apart from monitoring the distribution, the university is also in charge of monitoring the distribution of the money for the health care program and subsidized rice program.

Head of the facilitating team at the Lampung Education Council, Sutopo Gani Nugroho, said it was about time the administration provided free education for elementary school students, especially the poor ones.

"School fee assistance from the cut in the fuel subsidy can be the starting point to provide free education," he said.