JEDDAH, 14 September 2003 — It is the first day of school, 12 noon and parents and teachers are crowding the streets around the General Administration of Girls’ Education and inside the building.

There are many reasons for this chaos.

The main reason is the new policy implemented this year for registering first-grade students and for transferring students. Parents were formerly able to enroll their daughters in the public school of their choice; now it is done through the administration. The parents were supposed to send applications and fill out a form naming five school options for their daughters and their reasons for preferring these schools. The administration then enters the data into the computer which subsequently decides which school the student will go to based on various criteria. Parents learned about this from newspapers during the past two weeks.

The problem is that many students were not enrolled in any of the five schools chosen in their application. “My daughter passed sixth-grade elementary and she should now be in seventh-grade intermediate but instead, I read her name on the list for the same elementary school,” said Mohammed.

Another complained that his daughter was enrolled in a school far from where they live and it will be a problem to drive her there back and forth everyday and he can’t afford a driver. “I have been standing in line every day from morning to noon for three days just to get a registration form,” said Ahmed.

The man next to him said that he had been coming for 10 days to get a letter of transfer for his daughter to take to her school. Some of the administration employees ask the parents who didn’t see their daughters’ names in the newspaper to check with the schools because apparently they can’t find the names in the computer either; others continue to tell parents to “come tomorrow.” “I’m taking time off from work but I can’t waste my time here every day because some clerk has lost the registration form,” said Omar.

Some of the mothers have stood in the hot noonday sun for hours; they are outside the window for women because the women’s department does not handle student affairs.

The deputy director of Girls’ Education in Jeddah, Abdullah Al-Muhammadi, said the parents were the reason for this confusion because they missed the deadline to register even though they had the whole year and that the administration is working day and night at full capacity to meet the demands.

At the same time, inside the women’s department, hundreds of teachers are picking up letters of assignment for the school they should be teaching at. They were also supposed to find to which school they were assigned from the newspapers but some of them had not found their names or were objecting to the schools they had been assigned to. Those whose names were not on the list were asked to come on Tuesday and those objecting to their assignments were told nothing could be done.

“I have been asking for a transfer for seven years and every year you tell me that once my name is entered in the computer for the same school I can’t change it; this is ridiculous,” one teacher said in angry and exasperated frustration.

On another floor of the women’s department, a long line of teachers were learning if their names had been entered as replacement teachers while another line was those seeking jobs in adult literacy classes but a sign said there were no openings. The administration has recently canceled the contracts of 320 adult literacy teachers and closed 14 of these schools.

The women’s department is in an old building with no central air-conditioning; there is an air-conditioner in each room but its effect is scarcely noticed. The teachers sweltered in the heat and humidity in the hallways for hours. Drivers and male relatives were standing outside in the street, waiting for the women to finish their business. A scene of chaos, despair and frustration.