They want Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is scheduled to table the annual budget in the Dewan Rakyat on Oct 27, to deliver news that would mean they’ll have the necessary tools for their work and their pupils will have the amenities they require.
A primary school ICT teacher in Tambunan said teachers had been forced to fork out their own money to acquire pertinent instructional materials in the classroom due to budget cuts.
He said the government should in particular allocate enough funds for high-speed internet services in the schools.
“While the ministry has demanded that we use ICT via the Frog VLE (Virtual Learning Environment), we have had a hard time doing so because the buffering takes ages,” he said, referring to the cloud-based platform implemented through the government’s 1BestariNet project.
“The teachers in my school have to share a 1Mbps Streamyx service. The speed is at a snail’s pace. Sometimes the service doesn’t even work because there are too many simultaneous users.”
A Maktab Rendah Sains Mara teacher, Shafina Nazri, said her school had been forced to restrict the scope of many courses and programmes because the school could not afford to provide students with worksheets and other materials.
A Sabah-based teacher named Floriana said the budget should address the need of secondary schools for enough funds to acquire teaching tools and to maintain buildings and other assets.
She also called for increased allowances for school employees to help them meet the rising cost of living, especially in Sabah, where the prices of goods are higher than in Peninsular Malaysia.
A mother of twin children in a Chinese-medium school calling herself Sandy said the weight of bags that pupils were carrying to school were cause for concern.
She said the government needed to help schools provide lockers in which students could keep their books instead of lugging them between home and school.
“My kids have several textbooks per subject and they have to carry these in two different bags,” she said, adding that sometimes each child would be carrying a load of 10kg.
Zakaria Kasa of the National Professors Council called for a solution to the problem of teachers being overburdened with administrative work.
“I hope that the government will propose a solution for this because teachers have to handle many students at the same time and yet they need to perform heavy administrative tasks,” he said.
“It is affecting their performance in teaching.”