PETALING JAYA: A Pahang Tamil school is closer to getting its own permanent buildings after operating from makeshift cabins for the past 25 years, according to Gobind Singh Deo.
The Digital Minister said that the school board of SJK(T) Ladang Jeram has been registered with the Registrar of Societies (RoS), thus clearing a hurdle for it to move the school into permanent structures.
“The board of SJK(T) Ladang Jeram in Pahang has today been registered with the ROS,” Gobind said in a statement on Monday (Feb 24).
“Previously, it was reported that this school faced further delays in the construction of a permanent building due to the status of its school board (LPS), which was yet to be registered under the ROS,
“Last week, I raised the issue of SJK(T) Ladang Jeram, among others, in a meeting with Education Minister Fadhlina Sidek in Parliament.
“I welcome this development. We have taken steps to resolve this problem. We will now work with the Education Ministry to find a speedy solution to get the school its own building,” Gobind said.
On Feb 23, The Sunday Star featured SJK(T) Ladang Jeram’s latest plight in getting permanent buildings for the school’s over 40 pupils and 10 teachers who have been studying in cabins since 1999.
The school was first built in 1952 in the Jeram Estate. But when the estate was sold, it was forced to move in 1999 to its current site, about 20 minutes from Kuantan.
Pupils, teachers, and other staff were moved into cabins at the temporary site while new school buildings on a permanent plot of land were being built, explained Datuk Nadeson Kandasamy, who had been chairman of the school board since 2012.
In 2014, a tender was issued to a company to build new school buildings, but four years later, the developer ran into financial problems, and the project was halted, he said. The project’s cost was reportedly RM14mil.
Efforts to restart and revive the project between 2018 and 2023 were hampered due to the change in education ministers in the different administrations during that period, Nadeson said.
Discussions with the unity government started again when the administration took over, but last week, the school board suffered a setback when permission to register with the RoS was denied, Nadeson said.
Last year, the Attorney General’s chambers told the board that the LPS had to be registered under RoS so that it could lease the land for the new school.
