Back to School

Today, 5 January 2009, students in Jakarta return to their school again after spending a long Christmas, Muslim New Year and International New Year holidays.

And due to the rumors that have been spreading in the past few months about the change of School Entry Time from 7.00 am to 6.30 am, yesterday I called my son’s teacher and was informed that there is no change. Therefore, this morning me and my son left our home at 6.15 and arrived at the school at 6.30, and found that everything, including traffic condition, is still the same as usual.
But considering that serious preparation for said change has been made, a.o. by providing 34 special Free of Charge School Bus, I was curious about it. So I browsed the Net and found that there is still no certainty about the school time. Some schools have adjusted their schedules, but many others have not done so.
Tempo wrote that this morning the traffic is still jammed in spite of the change in school entry time. While Kompas wrote that the School Buses are still empty, and quoted some teachers as saying that this change of time would cause problems for the teachers not the children. This is obvious because many teachers are living far away from their schools, and they also have children of their own that they should take care.
Further, Detik wrote that some schools still adopt the same entry time as before.

Considering the above, I assume that the uncertainty of the change of school time is caused by the fact that the Jakarta government has still not issued a regulation about this. In this regards, I remember an article in Bisnis which quoted the Vice Governor of Jakarta Priyanto as saying that such regulation should be issued by 5 December 2008. Until then we can only hope that the said regulation will treat everyone i.e. students-their parents and teachers wisely. Beside that, hopefully better efforts would be made to solve the traffic jam problem such as by building more roads, and realizing the long pending Monorail construction, and Subway.

Image:BigFoto