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Education Minister Muhammad Nuh has hailed the distribution of school overhead aid this year as the best it has been since the program was implemented in 2005, with almost all the money earmarked for the first quarter already handed out.

As of Monday, 92 percent of the first of four allotments this year of the School Operational Fund (BOS) had been received by schools nationwide.

“Today is a happy day for all of us because never in the history of the BOS scheme has so much of the money been distributed so quickly in the first few weeks,” Nuh said in a teleconference with regional education agency heads.

The BOS, which is used by schools to cover their overhead costs and also serves as an indirect subsidy for students from low-income families, is this year being channeled to schools directly from the central government. That’s a switch from last year, when it was first distributed to regional education offices and then to the schools.

Prior to 2011, the fund was also distributed directly by the central government, with last year’s change being made to accommodate regional autonomy polices.

But the distribution of the fund throughout 2011 was severely delayed by bureaucratic red tape at the regional levels, with none of the quarterly allotments reaching all schools in time.

An evaluation of the 2011 distribution system, led by Vice President Boediono, concluded that the system was far too inefficient and recommended a return to distributing the money directly from the government to schools.

Nuh said the first BOS allotment of 2012 had reached all schools in 30 of the country’s 33 provinces, with only a handful of schools in Aceh, Papua and West Papua yet to get their money.

The first quarterly BOS allotment for 2012 was Rp 5.2 trillion ($570 million), with the fund for the year pegged at Rp 23.6 trillion — up significantly from the Rp 16.8 trillion earmarked last year.

In Monday’s teleconference with Muhammad, James Mondou, the head of the Papua education office, blamed the slow distribution in his province on delays in verifying the recipient schools’ bank account details and missing paperwork. However, he pledged to get all the schools their money by this Thursday.

Nuh had previously attributed last year’s poor distribution of the fund on regional education authorities.

“They have the money already, but it seems difficult for them to distribute it,” he said last year. “They have thousands of excuses, but I guess there’s really only one problem: lack of commitment.”

Suara Pembaruan