The Ministry of Education is racing against time to complete a study to hire private sector companies to transport female teachers. The effort will address problems while females travel to and from schools, said Noura Al-Fayez, Deputy Education Minister for Women's Education. Al-Fayez said conditions stipulated for consultative bodies invited to conduct the study include requirements that the current situation must be assessed, a database must be built to manage the service and plans must be created to establish and provide the transportation. A report in late 2007 by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, a Riyadh-based government research institute, found that female teachers traveling to and from schools had about a 50 percent greater chance of getting into car accidents than average Saudis. Its findings were based on figures from the late 1990s. “The issue has become a national concern,” said the study, which warned that the problem was growing because more teachers were graduating and being assigned to remote schools. One teacher, Nauf Al-Oneizi, wrote to officials and expressed her concern about having been assigned to a school more than 100 miles away from her place of residence in Al-Jouf. She said the three-hour ride on bad roads in a crowded van was unsafe and unpleasant. She died months later in a crash that also killed five other female teachers, their driver and four people in the car they hit. The Education Ministry has said the study on transportation must be completed in eight months, during which a schedule would established for executing its phases, Al-Fayez said. She expressed hope that the project would be launched in the first semester of the academic year 2011-12. Al-Fayez said her organization would assess a number of factors including the longest times teachers wait for vehicles, their speed limits, the maximum vehicle ages permitted and the longest journeys teachers take. She stressed that the study should also consider areas where the study of girls' government schools is restricted and the current and future demand for the transporting of teachers, which should be assessed every year for 15 years. A third key factor is that the study must “specify the segments that are studied. The research must include the number of teachers in education stages and schools; the number of teachers who would benefit from transportation, based on their economic and social status; how many teachers are using the current system; how many would be interested in using the service if it is improved; the rate of population growth in the regions; the nature of roads used by the transportation vehicles; and the geographic location of the schools,” she said. Al-Fayez said the study was motivated by the experiment of hiring private-sector companies to transport teachers for a second year and the transportation hardships some teachers suffer.
