Writing a Pollution Closure Policy for a Daycare or Tutoring Centre in Indonesia

The Regulation Names the Categories and Leaves the Closing to You

The haze settles overnight, the first parent messages at half past six asking whether class is on, and nobody has written down what the answer depends on. The air quality index does not settle it, because it sets categories and colours rather than opening hours. What it does settle is who is expected to act, and it is not you.

Peraturan Menteri Lingkungan Hidup dan Kehutanan Nomor 14 Tahun 2020 is the instrument in force for the Indeks Standar Pencemar Udara, the ISPU. It makes the Minister, governors and bupati or mayors responsible for determining the index, and provides that once the index sits in the tidak sehat band or worse those same officials carry out air pollution control measures under the applicable legislation. The duty named there is theirs.

The ministry directorate that administers the index describes its purpose as giving the public uniform air quality information and giving government something to weigh on pollution control, and notes that in areas prone to land and forest fires it can work as an early warning system. Early warning is a fair description of what it gives a centre owner. A signal is not a decision.

That leaves the decision where it started, with the person who has to reply to the parent. A policy written on the day is not a policy, because on the day every part of it becomes a negotiation with somebody who is already worried. The work is deciding the threshold, the fee treatment and the wording of the notice while the air is still clear.

What Does Each Band Actually Instruct?

The regulation carries an action column against each category, and it is more specific than most centres expect. It separates a sensitive group from everyone else and gives each a different instruction at every band. It does not say who belongs to the sensitive group, so naming that group is the first thing a policy has to do.

At tidak sehat, which begins at 101, the sensitive group may still go outside but is told to rest more often, keep activity light, and watch for cough or breathlessness. Everyone else is asked to cut prolonged outdoor physical activity. Nothing at this band asks anyone to stay in.

At sangat tidak sehat, from 201, the instruction to the sensitive group hardens to avoiding all outdoor activity, moving activity indoors, or rescheduling it to a time when the air is better. Rescheduling appears in the regulation's own words, which is worth knowing when a parent asks why a session moved rather than ran. Everyone else is told to avoid prolonged outdoor activity and consider moving indoors.

At berbahaya, from 301, the sensitive group is told to stay indoors and do very little, and everyone is told to avoid all outdoor activity. That is the top of the scale, and the instruction is still about being indoors. Closing a building appears nowhere in the table, at any band.

The guidance escalates from limiting outdoor exertion to eliminating it, and then stops. A centre that can genuinely keep children indoors has followed it without closing, and a centre that cannot has a reason to close that the index will never state on its behalf.

The Number on Screen Is Older and Thinner Than It Looks

ISPU is recalculated every hour, but each calculation runs on twenty-four hours of continuous monitoring data. The figure a centre reads at seven in the morning therefore describes the day behind it rather than the air in the car park at that moment. A policy keyed only to the index will always lag the weather.

Publication runs on two different clocks. The fine particulate parameter, PM2.5, is published to the public every hour across the full day, while the remaining six parameters are published at least twice, at nine in the morning and three in the afternoon. Before nine, the particulate figure is the only one guaranteed to be current.

That cadence changes at exactly the point the category does. Once the index reaches tidak sehat or worse, every parameter moves to hourly publication, so the information arrives faster precisely when a centre needs it faster.

The index can also be absent. Readings are removed while a station is under maintenance, when its voltage is unstable, when a sensor is faulty, or during a power cut, and a category is only assigned when at least 75 per cent of the data is valid. A policy that says nothing about a quiet station has a hole in it on exactly the mornings that matter.

Which Threshold Belongs in Your Policy?

A workable policy carries two thresholds, because the guidance itself moves in two stages. The first is where outdoor sessions stop and everything moves inside. The second is where the centre does not open at all.

Setting the first at tidak sehat tracks the guidance directly, since that is where the instruction to cut prolonged outdoor activity appears. The regulation's own conversion table puts the top of the band below it at a twenty-four-hour PM2.5 concentration of 55.4 microgrammes per cubic metre, so the index boundary has a stated concentration behind it if a parent asks what the number means.

The second threshold is a judgement about your building rather than about the air. A centre with sealed rooms, working air conditioning and no reason to take children outside can honestly follow the indoors instruction at any band. One with open corridors, a courtyard between rooms and fans instead of air conditioning cannot, and its second threshold sits lower.

Write down who checks, when they check, and which single source they check. One named person reading one named government source at a fixed time removes the argument about whose app was right.

Write down who decides and by when. A decision made at half past seven for a nine o'clock class leaves a parent no time, and one made the previous evening is a guess. For most centres the honest slot is a fixed morning time, published in advance, with the notice going out whether the answer is yes or no.

Write down what happens when an instruction arrives from outside. If your Dinas Pendidikan or local government issues a direction, it replaces your own threshold for the day, and the policy should name who receives it and who acts on it. Centres running early education programmes and after-school classes on one site can sit under different instructions on the same morning, so say which cohort each one covers.

Staying Open Only Counts if Indoors Means Something

Staying open and moving everything inside is the answer the guidance points at most often, and the one most likely to be claimed without being delivered. IDAI, the Indonesian paediatric society, is specific about what indoors has to involve during a smoke episode. Windows and doors closed, and where air conditioning runs, the circulation set so outside air is not drawn in.

The same society explains why children are the group most affected by smoke. They breathe more air while their body weight and airway calibre are smaller, and this is the age at which they are constantly moving. That combination is why a centre cannot simply copy an office's policy and change the letterhead.

For a child with asthma the advice is that the reliever inhaler must be available, particularly once cough or breathlessness appears, and that their regular asthma medication continues. For a centre that becomes a register question rather than a medical one. Which children have asthma, whose inhaler is on site, and who is permitted to hand it over.

Knowing which children are actually in the building on a morning like that is an attendance question before it is anything else. Digital attendance with timestamps records who staff checked in, and the limits matter as much as the feature here, because parents cannot check a child in themselves and the platform does not work without a connection. A policy that depends on a screen needs its paper fallback written down beside it.

Who Pays for a Day You Do Not Open?

This is the question that generates the actual argument, and the air quality index does not answer it. It is answered by the enrollment terms the parent agreed to, and by what those terms say about a day the centre does not run.

Indonesian contract law recognises force majeure, a situation in which a party is prevented from performing by something outside their fault that could not have been foreseen, and in which damages are not owed. Whether a particular haze episode meets that description under a particular contract is decided on the facts, and it turns on how the contract itself is written. A general article cannot answer it for your terms, and this one is not trying to.

What is inside your control is the wording, and the time to fix it is before the season rather than during it. Terms that say what happens to a missed session, whether it is credited, rescheduled into a named window, or neither, remove the question entirely, because the answer was agreed when the parent signed.

Rescheduling is worth preferring to refunding for a reason the regulation supplies rather than the accountant. The action column at sangat tidak sehat names rescheduling to a time with better air as an acceptable response, so a make-up session is not a concession invented to avoid a refund.

Whatever you decide, the schedule and the money have to end up agreeing with each other. Happy Kamper holds the schedule and handles billing and payments, and a session moved in the schedule does not change an invoice by itself, because invoices are not generated from attendance records. The platform holds both records and does not decide which of them is right, and it does not determine whether your terms entitle a parent to anything.

How Do You Send the Notice Without Starting a Panic?

A notice that causes panic usually arrives late, hedges, and leaves the parent holding a question. The fix is structural rather than tonal. Send it at the time you promised, and answer the three things a parent is asking.

They are asking whether their child is expected today, what happens to the session if not, and what you are doing for the children who are there. Answer those in that order, in the first three lines, before explaining the reading. The reading is the reason for the message, not the message.

Name the number and the index together, because a parent comparing your notice against a phone app will otherwise see two figures and trust the app. Saying that the ISPU reading for your area reached a stated band at a stated time, and that your policy moves sessions indoors at that band, gives them something they can check.

Announcements and daily updates reach parents inside the platform in English and Indonesian, and the limits are worth more attention than the feature. Staff write the update themselves and the system leaves it in the language it was written in, so a bilingual notice is two pieces of writing, and there is no delivery without a connection, so a family offline that morning does not receive it. Keep whatever channel your parents already answer on as the second route, and say in the policy which one is primary.

One thing is worth stating plainly. Happy Kamper does not read an air quality index, does not decide whether your centre opens, and does not tell you whether your terms let you keep a fee. It holds the register, the schedule, the invoice and the message, and each of those is only as good as the policy you wrote before the haze arrived.

This is general information about the rules named here, not legal or medical advice on any particular contract, child or building. Put your own circumstances to a professional before you act on it.