NU schools told to increase quality, expert says

Surabaya, NU Online
Education quality of NU schools in Surabaya and surrounding areas would always be improved. At this point, there were some 50 NU schools in the capital participating in a workshop held at the Surabaya's Ma'arif office on Thursday (25/12).

Each school was represented by head master, deputy head master and administration chief. The 50 schools consisted of junior high (SMP), Islamic junior high (MTs), senior high (SMA), Islamic senior high (MA) and vocational high schools (SMK) affiliated with NU and NU Teachers' Union (Pergunu) in Surabaya.<>

While the committees and trainers were from board members of NU Scholars Association (ISNU), Indonesian Muslim Students Movement (PMII), students and lecturers of Surabaya's 10 November Institute of Technology (ITS) and some Japan's NU alumni.

Organizing committee chief, Agus Zainal Arifin, said that the workshop was aimed at increasing quality of schools and madrassa (Islamic schools) within NU milieu.

Agus was of view that those involving themselves in educational institutions must take into account of the importance of increasing school education quality, creating such conducive teaching and learning process, optimizing society's participation and so on.

"In addition to optimizing active, creative, effective and comfortable learning and other strategies dealing with the capacity building of school stake holders," the assistant dean of Information Technology Faculty of ITS said.

In the workshop, the participants were divided into some groups in accordance with their own posts like head master, deputy head master, and administration chief. The head master group focused more on discussing techniques of producing effective and efficient policies and deputy head master group dealt with the implementation

While administration group focused more on realizing school information system. In dealing with the school information system, the group was introduced with four administration functions, namely student administration, academic administration, finance administration and personnel administration.

In the plenary session attended by all participants, each group chairman explained his/her discussion results as such recommendation for decision makers and school managers. Among the recommendations proposed more intensive trainings for school administration chiefs in regard with the troubleshooting of school information system.

In the workshop, all participants also received CDs containing school information system, electronic school books, school management documents and school administration packages.

The committee expected the similar purposeful workshops to be continued next month with more concrete topics.

"As (organizing) committee chief, I do thank all committees, trainers and participants enthusiastically want to increase education quality within NU milieu," Agus told NU Online.

Agus also said that he would always be ready to take part in other similar workshops in other regions. (nam)