The students who ‘seek refuge’

REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, CIREBON – Those kids are “refugee students”. If the term usually related to politic, then the kids give different meaning. They are elementary school students of SDN I Keduanan in Cirebon, West Java.

Since their school building is nearly collapsed, they must “seek refuge” at another school nearby to continue their study. Look at the school building. At the end of last year, two of six classrooms were collapsed.

Well, the walls still erect but without the roof and ceiling. While four other classrooms are not appropriate to be called as classrooms, as their walls cracked and the roof holed. Yet, the kids seem never lose their zest to study.

“Built in 1980, the school building has never been renovated, not even once,” a teacher told Republika, recently.

SDN I Keduanan is not the only sad story of in Indonesian education system. They do not need any luxury, they only need proper classrooms to study, to achieve their dreams in the future. In fact, nearly two hundred thousand classrooms need to be repaired or rehabilitated. Yet, rebuilding school program seems become a big task for the government. From the target of rebuilding 21,500 classrooms, only 32.5 percent of it has been completed during 2011 alone.

“About 32.5 percent of the rebuilding program has been fully completed. Those classrooms spread in 1,167 schools while the rest are still in progress,” the minister of Education and Culture, Mohammad Nuh, said, on Tuesday.

The government allocates 15.822 trillion IDR for reconstruction of public schools in Indonesia in 2012. Nuh said the money would be used for building 173,344 classrooms, including 132,217 classrooms in elementary schools and 41,027 classrooms in junior high schools.

"The money will be transferred to the respective schools starting this week," he said, adding that his ministry would closely observe the progress of the reconstruction. Well, that is good news for SDN I Keduanan and thousand other schools.