Digest on Malaysian News

Fund is hard to come by especially if you are not part of the government. What more to say if you are from a church. Then what is the church authority thinking when they decided to turn St Joseph's school to private instead of conveniently receiving yearly grants from the Ministry of Education.? Apparently, the MOE is trying to get the church to REMOVE all the crosses (and other Christian artifacts) from the classrooms because there a quite of Muslim students studying in the school.

St Joseph school being established by the church is to provide education and religious guides to Christians. For non-Christians, it would be purely for education purpose. There is a lot of Sarawak prominent leaders receiving their early education from St Joseph including Taib Mahmud, the Chief Ministry of Sarawak as well as other Muslim leaders. It has been proven that those Muslim leaders studying in St Joseph before does not make them any less Muslim.

Asking the church to privatized its school (and cutting off its funding) is a blatant discrimination since education is to be provided free by the government.

Privatised St Joseph’s School here will start its Primary One and Form One classes in January next year.

This was revealed by Chief Minister Pehin Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud at the SJS Band’s Thanksgiving cum Old Josephians’ Reunion Dinner at Riverside Hotel here last night.

These classes will be housed at the current St Joseph Tuition Centre which used to be St Bernadette’s private school here.

Taib said he would contribute his one month’s salary towards the setting up of the school.

Taib, who is a former student of St Joseph’s secondary school, said the new private school would need RM10 million to build and another RM3 million as operation startup cost.

In January this year, church officials broke the news at a dinner on the plan to privatise St Joseph’s government-aided primary and secondary schools.

Subsequently, Taib also affirmed this intention to reporters.

Currently, St Joseph’s secondary school has over 1,500 students while St Joseph’s primary, 855 pupils.

Among those present at the dinner were Taib’s wife Puan Sri Ragad Kurdi Taib, Catholic Archbishop John Ha, former state secretary Tan Sri Datuk Amar Bujang Noor and State Legal Counsel Datuk JC Fong.