The smoke has moved 1.4 million students out of the classroom

Schools in the fire provinces have stopped opening their doors. Gogot Suharwoto of the education ministry said that around 1.43 million students from 12,874 schools were studying remotely in the six provinces worst hit by the forest and land fires. Three are on Sumatra: Riau, Jambi and South Sumatra. Three are on Borneo: West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan and South Kalimantan. West Kalimantan carries most of the weight on its own, with about 1.1 million of those students, and it has had the widest fires of any province this year.

The switch runs from Monday to Friday, and Reuters reports that officials will review it every three days. The trigger is the air pollution standard index in each area, the government's own scale for how dirty the air is, which is read locally rather than set once for the whole country. So a district can go back to classrooms while its neighbour stays shut, and no family gets told in advance how long this lasts.

That three-day rhythm is the part worth noticing. Closing schools is the cheap, fast lever a government can pull when the air turns bad, and it is now being pulled across six provinces at once. It does nothing about the fires themselves, and it moves the cost onto households: someone has to be home, and the lesson only happens if there is a phone, a signal and data to run it.

Why it matters

If you live in Riau, Jambi, South Sumatra or any of the three Kalimantan provinces, your child's schooling is now decided three days at a time, so plan childcare and data in short blocks rather than for the month. Parents who work shifts or away from home are the ones who lose most, since remote learning quietly assumes an adult is around. Watch the local air pollution index reading rather than national announcements, because that number is what actually reopens your school.