Move to block 'tea money'

Amnuay asked the court to order Suchart and Chinnapat Bhumirat, secretary-general of the Basic Education Commission, to revoke the donations-for-places policy as well as certain parts of the ministerial regulation on student admissions for 2012.
Under the regulation, children of teachers and school staff as well as students under the patronage of a school’s benefactors, have the right to enrol without taking entrance exams.
Amnuay also wanted the court to issue a temporary injunction against policy implementation.
Allowing rich children to buy seats was unfair to the poor, while giving teachers’ children the automatic right to enrol was discrimination, he said. Allowing the children of a school’s benefactors to get in was within the framework of “tea money” and could lead to politicians, who allocate budgets to schools, to get a large quota of student seats.
As for Suchart’s comment that the policy would have nothing to do with school seat trading, Amnuay said it remained unclear what would happen when the policy was implemented.
He also said that he would sue all schools that adopted the donation-for-school-seat policy on case-by-case basis.