補習-Parents draw lines on costly textbooks

Angry parents and students marched from Chater Garden in Central to the government headquarters yesterday to demand that publishers loosen the system for textbook sales before the next school year begins.
About 30 protesters shouted slogans including “End monopolies by textbook publishers” and “Cut prices.”

A parent named Fung said her textbook burden “has increased even though wages have been stagnant.”

Vincent Cheng Wing-shun, the education spokesman for the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong, said the party has collected 25,000 signatures from parents for a petition that is going to the government.

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“We’ve also collected about 600 kilograms of unused teaching and learning materials from parents of four primary and secondary schools in Sham Shui Po.”

Parents have paid for these as they were forced to buy packages of materials rather than individual items.

Cheng said the DAB also backs an Education Bureau decision to call for tenders “to introduce more competition into the monopolized textbook market.”

The government “should start planning for tenders as soon as possible,” he added, as parents face surging prices and the bureau “should face the problem and proactively find ways to help them.”

Secretary for Education Michael Suen Ming-yeung said last week that, with textbook prices increasing by 3-5 percent for the 2011-12 school year, a task force will recommend ways of tendering out books if publishers refuse to accept a “debundling” policy.

Publishers agreed to debundle new textbooks for the next school year, which begins in September, but that is just 5 percent of the market.

A spokeswoman for both the Hong Kong Educational Publishers Association and the Anglo-Chinese Textbook Publishers Organisation said they can only debundle all textbooks within three years rather than the year sought by the bureau “because of copyright issues.”