Jakarta, NU Online
The Education Ministry has called on regional authorities to crack down on public schools charging exorbitant and often illegal fees from students.<>

Hamid Muhammad, the ministry’s director general of secondary education, said in Jakarta on Friday that a 2009 ministerial regulation served as a guideline for the kinds of fees that schools could charge, but that regional school boards should draw up their own detailed and specific regulations. He said the average cost of a senior high or vocational school education was around Rp 2.5 million ($253) per year per student, but that it varied by region from Rp 1.5 million to Rp 8 million.

“There are some districts where the general cost of education is low, and others, like Jakarta, where it’s very high,” Hamid was quoted by the Jakarta Globe as saying.

“If we don’t have standardized rates, we can’t protect the public from these fee discrepancies.”

He said the central government was trying to bring down the cost through its school operational aid (BOS) program, which defrays schools’ overhead costs. For secondary schools, the annual subsidy amounts to Rp 1 million per student.

“So let’s say that in Jakarta the cost of a year in secondary school is around Rp 5 million. From the BOS, there’s Rp 1 million in aid, and if the Jakarta administration provides its own aid of Rp 2 million per student, then the cost to each student comes down to just Rp 2 million for the year,” he said.

State schools are prohibited from charging students for tuition, which is supposed to be free. However, the schools charge for a litany of auxiliary expenses, including entrance and registration fees for new students, uniform and book costs, building maintenance fees and mandatory “donations.”

Registration fees have long been decried by parents as among the biggest cost of sending their children to school, and with the registration period for the coming school year currently in full swing, more complaints have been aired about the process.

In Bekasi, West Java, parents seeking to register their students at a popular junior high school earlier this week reported being offered a guaranteed place by people claiming to be local education officials for a fee of up to Rp 3.5 million per student.

Hamid said some of the schools charging the highest auxiliary fees were those that were previously part of the government’s now-shelved experiment to implement an international-standard curriculum in state institutions.

The program, known as the RSBI, was widely panned because the schools were allowed to charge as much as they wanted in fees, leading to accusations that students from low-income families were being denied the chance to study there.

Hamid said that since the program was scrapped after being ruled unconstitutional in January, the former RSBI schools had resorted to conjuring up other auxiliary fees to make up for lost income.

“These ex-RSBI schools must comply with the same standards as regular state schools,” he said.

He added that one of the excuses that schools were giving to parents for the higher fees was that they did not get BOS funding to defray their overhead costs.

Hamid dismissed such claims, saying every state school received the BOS and none of them could decline the funding for any reason.

“Officials at these RSBI schools must remember that they’re running a state school, which is paid for by the government for the good of the people,” he said.

“If they want to turn down the BOS, then they might as well also turn down government funding for teachers’ salaries.”

Retno Listyarti, the secretary general of the Federation of Indonesian Teachers Associations (FSGI), said school boards in some regions were trying to revive a system of segregating students according to how much they could afford to pay.

She said that in Bandung, the municipal school board had officially grouped state schools into three clusters, with the first cluster containing only the former RSBI schools and the second cluster containing the more popular regular schools.

Schools in those two categories were allowed to open their registration windows for the new school year earlier than those in the third cluster, which Retno said would disadvantage students who had done poorly on the national exams in May and were awaiting the results of their makeup tests.

“It stands to reason that those students will only have the opportunity to register for the third-tier schools,” she said.

Editing by Sudarto Murtaufiq