N

ational Education Minister Muhammad Nuh said it was impossible to stop the International School Pilot Project (RSBI) program despite its shortcomings.

The pilot project is a mandate of the national education system aimed at creating state schools of international standard (SBI).

“It’s impossible to stop because the program is a phase that must be gone through to produce SBI. Should there be mistakes in the implementation, what we have to do is to evaluate them,” Nuh said in Purwokerto, Central Java, on Friday.

He said a recent evaluation had revealed mistakes in the implementation of RSBI.

“The most fatal one was that most RSBI classes have been allocated only for students from wealthy families. This must not happen anymore.”

The RSBI program, he added, was open to all students regardless of their families’ economic status. But he added that the program needed more funding to ensure its effectiveness.

However, he said, poorer families must be protected from the burden of high tuition fees.

“The burden must be distributed among the parents according to their respective wealth,” he said.

The National Education Ministry’s Research and Policy Center recently recommended that the RSBI program be temporarily put on hold.

The recommendation was based on a survey revealing that RSBI had not been implemented according to plan.

The survey also showed that RSBI had been requiring extremely high admission fees from parents.

The report surveyed at random 130 of the total 1,350 RSBI elementary to senior high and vocational schools across Indonesia. It revealed that tuition fees ranged between Rp 400,000 (US$44.00) and Rp 20 million per month.

It was for that reason, Nuh said, that all RSBI schools would be required to allocate 20 percent of their entrance places to students from poor families, and charge them lower tuition fees.

He said schools that ignored the regulation would be evaluated. “The quota for students from economically poor families is a social aspect that has often been violated by school managements.”

Separately, commenting on the troubled School Operational Aid (BOS) fund, Nuh said that his ministry in cooperation with the Home Ministry had recommended a cut in the budget allocation of hundreds of regencies for the late distribution of BOS fund, referring to regional government allocated funds that are distributed to state schools.

“I can confirm that more than 100 regencies will receive sanctions for distributing their BOS fund late. As of yesterday some 100 regencies had not finished distributing the fund,” he said.