The Malaysian Insight

THE controversy over religious segregation at a Sabah mission school is the end result of a much more serious issue – a chronic shortage of teachers and facilities in the state amid an increasing number of students.  

This prompted SM All Saints principal Dr Mary Gombidau to segregate the Form One classes according to faith, making it more convenient for Muslim students to attend Islamic Studies and for non-Muslims to attend Moral Studies without changing classrooms.

Parties familiar with the issue said due to the lack of manpower and facilities, the principal was forced to group students based on religion.

A parent, Robert Francis Peters, said he found out that another school in Kota Kinabalu, SK Mutiara, was forced to do the same thing.

The former All Saints parent-teacher association exco member said parents tried to intervene with Gombidau’s decision, but were told not to interfere. This prompted a backlash and an online petition against the segregation.

He said the problem is related to the way the All Saints timetable was drawn up, but didn’t take into account that Muslim students now outnumbered non-Muslims in the school.

A teacher who requested anonymity said most schools formulated timetables almost same way and that to facilitate Islamic and Moral Studies, students of are grouped according to faith.

“I’m not sure what the fuss is all about in All Saints. But schools like SM Sanzac, the number of Muslim students outnumber non-Muslims.

“So, the school decided to put the non-Muslims into one class to make it easy for lessons to be conducted.

“For example, there are only 12 non-Muslim students in the school’s Form Two. But there are seven Form Two classes, and they were mixed with Muslim students in one class of 38.

The remaining six classes are all Muslim students,” he told The Malaysian Insight.

He believed the problem faced by Gombidau could be the sudden influx of Muslim students for the year, adding that a school like All Saints usually had non-Muslims as the majority.

Another parent said it was not until March 9 that parents found out that the school had requested for additional Islamic Studies teachers, but was rejected by the state Education Department due to a state-wide shortage.

When asked, state Education and Innovation Minister Dr Yusof Yakob sidestepped the issue, but said the matter has been resolved and people should move forward.

“All that is important right now is that there is no more segregation in this school. The principal now admits she missed the bigger picture when she made the decision,” he said.

But Yusof acknowledged the infrastructure shortage in urban schools and that some schools had to pack in up to 60 students into a classroom.

Matters are made worse, he said, as most parents who work in the city prefer to send their children to urban schools, like All Saints.

“But we are trying our best to resolve this problem, … (such as) by constructing new classrooms,” he said.

Dr Yusof said the lack of facilities in urban schools is not the only problem, as there are 587 rural schools that are dilapidated and need urgent repairs.

Nonetheless, he said, the Warisan-led government aims to resolve the shortage of classrooms and dilapidated schools in the next five years and is in talks with the federal government to deal with the problem.

“We have also got about RM42 million in emergency funds for schools with urgent needs,” he said. – March 18, 2019.