Hundreds of pupils and their parents in Sabah’s Telupid district, some 200km from here, were shocked and disappointed to find no proper classrooms available on the first day of school.
Some 800 pupils of SK Pekan Telupid had been studying in makeshift classrooms housed under canopies since the roof of a school building block collapsed following a thunderstorm and strong winds in June last year.
A father, Dadie Ismail, said that he found it disappointing that the damaged school block has not been repaired despite the school holidays the past month.
“I thought the repair works would be carried out during the past school break but now, we came back to find that our children still have to go to class under the canopies,” he said.
He said what made it worse was that it rained heavily not long after the pupils arrived in school for the first day of the 2019 session on Jan 2.
Dadie said he hopes the Education Department and the state government would look into this matter immediately.
In another district, in the interior areas of Sook, Keningau, a pre-school building was razed to the ground following a fire at about 3pm.
Sabah Fire and Rescue Department operations chief Khatizah Rahaban said in a statement that it was lucky no preschoolers were there during the incident at SK Nandagan.
“The affected building housed 18 pupils but they had all gone home when the fire broke out,” she said.
The fire did not spread to other parts of the school as the affected building was far from the other blocks.