By Mohammed Al-Subaie

Okaz/Saudi Gazette

AL-KHORMAH — A number of tweeters have attacked Education Minister Ahmed Al-Issa for his tweet on the first day of the new academic year in which he said all schools were ready to receive the students and that they were all supplied with textbooks.

The tweeters also criticized his visits to two schools in Riyadh and said he should have visited more schools especially in the suburban areas.

The tweeters — parents, students and teachers — said not all the schools were supplied with the textbooks, especially secondary schools.

"The students have come to their schools but the textbooks were missing," wrote Atta Allah Ghareeb Al-Doukhi.

He said for more than a week the ministry was talking about the readiness of the schools but the first day of the new academic year showed the shallowness of the claim.

Another tweeter was surprised that the minister wrote his tweet at 7:59 a.m., a minute before the school day had started.

Abdulaziz Abu Nayan hoped that the minister's visit to the two primary schools in Riyadh was unannounced and not planned two or three weeks earlier.

"Let the minister visit schools outside Riyadh to see how the students were overcrowding in the classes," wrote Mohammed Al-Sahli.

Meanwhile in Madinah, a number of teachers complained of acute shortage of teachers and said this made them take more classes during the day than their original quotas.

Aminah Al-Marwani, a female secondary school teacher, said the shortage of teachers made them put more students in the same class bringing the number sometimes to 59.

"This will adversely affect students and will make it difficult for the teacher to deal with them," she said.

Marwani said the shortage is especially noticed in teachers for science and mathematics. She hoped that the ministry would act quickly to appoint more teachers to end this problem.

An intermediate school female teacher by the name Hana, said her school suffered from the shortage of teachers for sciences and Arab and English languages.

She said female teachers were overburdened with extra classes.

Bandar Al-Harbe, a male teacher, said the shortage of art teachers was eternal in schools and the issue has not been solved for many years.

"There are only two art teachers in my school. They are extremely exhausted because they are given more classes than their original quota," he added.

In Madinah also, parents complained that many of the rented school buildings were cracking and some of them were on the verge of collapse.

They said their wards could not practice sport in the rented buildings because of lack of space.

Spokesman of the department of education, Omar Barnawi, hastened to deny these claims and said every rented school building would be immediately vacated if it showed any cracks.

The Madinah parents also complained that a number of the private schools have upped their fees without prior notice.

Alya Al-Ahmedi, a mother of two intermediate and secondary school girls, said the schools increased their fees this year by about SR1,000 over their fees last year.

"I was obliged to pay so that the education of my daughters was not interrupted," she said.

Umm Noor, another mother, said she had to transfer her daughter to a government school after she was asked to pay an amount of SR10,700 for each of the two semesters.

Director of the department of the private schools, Amal Abu Al-Hassan, said the new fees were approved by the Ministry of Education and were announced on the private education e-portal.