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School zoning system benefits students, parents and schools
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Home address verification: An administrative officer of SMAN 8 Depok state high school in West Java verifies a student’s home address during a new student enrollment session, as part of implementing the Education and Culture Ministry’s new school zoning enrollment system. The new system requires schools to prioritize enrolling students who live within a certain catchment area. (JP/Arief Suhardiman)
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wo years ago when Abdul Muhi was a 16-year-old junior high school student, he rode a bicycle for 30 minutes to get to school every day because his school was located far from where he lived in Cilodong district in Depok, West Java.
“I felt exhausted by the time I reached school. One day, I had to take an exam. I was almost late and because I was sweating profusely from all the cycling, my exam sheets were soaking wet,” Abdul said.
Things changed a year ago when he was enrolled in SMA 8 Depok state high school, which is located near his house in Cilodong, which has implemented the school zoning enrollment system for the 2017-2018 academic year.
“Now, to go to school I can take a 10-minute angkot [minivan] ride, spending only Rp 4,000 on daily round trips,” he told a group of journalists who visited the high school to observe the Education and Culture Ministry’s school zoning enrollment system early this month.
Previously, state schools applied an enrollment system that prioritized students’ national exam results. This made it difficult for some students to enroll in schools in the vicinity of their residential areas, draining their energy by long commutes to school every day.
Furthermore, using exam results as the sole criteria for student enrollment created a tendency among parents to chose popular schools that were well-known for their high educational quality that helped students get high grades in national exams, which in turn had high exam score cut-off points as requirements, making it hard for students to be accepted.
Launched in 2016, the school zoning enrollment system is a ministry effort to make state schools prioritize students who live in their vicinities in order to solve the aforementioned problems and boost the overall quality of education.
The new system also seeks to create an educational ecosystem where students, parents and their neighborhoods provide a conducive environment for students to pursue knowledge in an optimum state of mind. Thus, parents will also feel the benefits of the new system.
“Because his school is located near where we live, we don’t have to spend too much money to cover his daily commute,” Sujana, Abdul’s father, said. “Furthermore, it is also easier for us parents to monitor his activities.”
With the new system, schools have also started to form tight cooperation with their surrounding communities to help foster students’ educational progress.
According to SMA 8 Depok principal Nurlaely, the new system’s implementation helps teachers to get to know parents better, while making it easier for the school to conduct activities at night without neighbors objecting to the noise these activities create, since the activities are also participated in by neighborhood children.
Non-discriminative school enrollment
To refine the policy’s implementation, the ministry recently issued Ministerial Decree No. 14/2018, which seeks to boost the overall quality of the country's education through non-discriminative and transparent school enrollment methods for elementary and junior high school students.
“Through the new ministerial decree, the ministry has simplified the old regulation by revising a number of terms detailing the implementation of the school enrollment zoning system, starting from its requirements, selection, school zone classification and distribution of students,” Education and Culture Minister Muhadjir Effendy said late May.
According to Elementary and Secondary Education Director General Hamid Muhammad, the new ministerial decree was formulated based on feedback from education agencies across the country concerning obstacles they faced in implementing the new system in the field.
Nurlaely said that with the new system, a school set quotas to be fulfilled in five different student categories as criteria for enrollment.
The categories are: local residence, with a 10 percent quota; students from underprivileged families, with a 20 percent quota; teachers’ children and children with special needs, with a 5 percent quota; children with high non-academic achievements, with a 20 percent quota; and children with high academic achievements, with a 45 percent quota.
For all five categories, the proximity of a student’s residence to a school is a highly important criterion for enrollment. Each school also uses GoogleMap technology to verify and locate students’ exact address to make sure that those living near the school are prioritized for enrollment.
