Dr. Ayed Al-Raddadi Al-Madinah First of all, I have to thank all concerned authorities on their seriousness and determination to put an end to the situation of undocumented expatriates. No country in the world would allow foreigners to stay on illegally. The expatriates staying legally in our country have every right to enjoy safety and security on equal footing with the citizens. The events of the past few days have proved beyond doubt that expatriates without legal residence permits are a serious threat to the country and its people. The interview recently conducted by Okaz with Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Haqbani, chairman of the national committee on private and international education at the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry is an eye opener. He said about 99 percent of female teachers in international schools are not under the sponsorship of these schools. He also said many of the female teachers are on the sponsorship of their husbands and they fear that their husbands may divorce them if they transfer their iqamas to others. According to Al-Haqbani, the certificates of many of these teachers do not qualify them to teach the subjects they are teaching. This happens while there are thousands of qualified Saudi women looking for jobs. There are a total of 3,271 international schools all over the Kingdom with 572,688 male and female students and 51,426 male and female teachers. There are some schools with more than 200,000 students which are threatened with closure because they have employed expatriates without regular iqamas. I do not know the justifications of the Ministry of Education when it allowed these schools to appoint expatriate women teachers to teach subjects which are not commensurate with their qualifications, while refusing to employ qualified Saudi women with university degrees and long experience. The international schools have not appointed Saudi teachers though the Human Resources Development Fund (Hadaf) would pay half of their salaries. Schools raise a hue and cry that they might be obliged to close down if they paid every Saudi teacher a monthly salary of SR5,000 plus SR600 transport allowance. These complaints should not deter concerned authorities from forcing these schools to appoint Saudi cadres. International schools talked much about themselves and boasted that they had highly-qualified teachers. The status-correction campaign has revealed the falsehood of this claim. Following this, people will soon come to know that the syllabuses of many of these schools, including the English language, are weak. Like government schools, international schools need to be developed.
