Back to school, squalor for SMK Sundar pupils in Sarawak

The children have to fight over free textbooks which are torn and inadequate at SMK Sundar. – Pic courtesy of Baru Bian, January 5, 2016.The first day of school in Sarawak yesterday was heartbreak for one parent in Limbang when he returned his son to boarding school at SMK Sundar.

The school and hostel were in a state of squalor, and his son was given an “old, torn, stained, smelly and unhygienic mattress” to sleep on.

The free textbooks were also insufficient.

These complaints were forwarded to the area’s state representative, Ba’kelalan assemblyman Baru Bian, who did not disclose the parent’s name.

“Mereka berebut dengan buku texs seperti ikan makan baja. Siapa dulu dia dapat,” Baru quoted the parent as saying. (They scrambled for the textbooks like fish going after the feed pellets. Who gets there first will get them.) 

“It is hard enough for parents to leave their children in a faraway school, but to see the appalling conditions their children are subjected to is heart-breaking,” Baru said.

The Sarawak PKR chairman requested the state minister overseeing education matters, Women, Welfare and Family Development Minister Datuk Fatimah Abdullah to investigate conditions in the school and “to make immediate improvements”.

“How can parents have any confidence that their children will fare well when they have to put up with Third-World conditions?

“Their young inquiring minds are ready for learning and development but they are not given proper textbooks.

“Their growing bodies need proper rest but they are given mattresses that are torn, stained, smelly and unhygienic.

“Does the government really expect our schoolchildren to thrive and excel by subjecting them to this squalor?”

Baru said it was no wonder that Sarawak’s rural pupils were performing worse than Vietnamese rural pupils in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for 15-year-olds’ performance on mathematics, science, and reading.

But reports on the dilapidated condition of Sarawak rural schools are nothing new.

The auditor-general, in the last quarter report last year, stated that more than 25% of schools in Sarawak have “serious defects”, to which Baru said in November that “nobody in Sarawak is surprised”.

He said then of the 12 schools in his constituency, all but one were in a serious state of disrepair.

Baru said the problem has persisted because “there is no political will to improve rural schools”.

“There is no real effort on the federal government’s part to address this problem.”

Baru said the shocking state of Sarawak’s rural schools “is the only indicator we need of the failure of the Barisan Nasional government”.

“The BN government should be thoroughly ashamed of this ‘achievement’ brought about by decades of mismanagement and corruption.”

- TMI