On September 1, the first day of the new semester, 160,000
children of migrant workers said goodbye to their shabby old
schools and went to all kinds of public and non-government-run
schools with 1.7 million other Beijing pupils. The issue of
education for children of migrant workers has been solved.
Beijing Fengtai District has closed a total of 57 non-public
schools that were built without the approval of the education
watchdog. Officials of the district education bureau helped parents
to fill in transient papers and introduce their children to 40
other public schools. Special offices were set up to help migrant
students deal with the transfer procedure. The education bureau
will compensate these public schools, according to the number of
migrant students they receive. Until September 1, the number of
migrant students who now study at the public schools on a temporary
basis reached 26,000 from 12,000. Only several hundred students are
now studying in their previous schools which will shut soon.
For example, Li Hanxuan, who once studied in Pengbo Primary
School, is now a pupil of Xiaotun Primary School in Fengtai
District. Pengbo Primary School had shabby facilities and lacked
good quality teaching. The classrooms were dark and most desks and
chairs were broken. “The new school is clean. The teachers are very
kind to me. I get along well with my fellow classmates,” Li Hanxuan
said. Xiaotun Primary School has received most of the migrant
children in Fengtai District this semester.
Another 30,000 migrant children went to new schools in Haidian
District too. Besides letting migrant children study at public
schools on a temporary basis, Haidian District also set up branches
of public schools to house migrant children by borrowing public
schools’ buildings. These branches will be authorized as
non-state-run schools if they prove their quality of teaching and
facilities are up to a common standard within three years. For
example, Mingyuan Primary School is the first non-state-run school
especially built for migrant children, by borrowing Susansi Public
Primary School’s buildings. It is now managed by Susansi Public
Primary School. Some public schools in Haidian District also set up
special classes for migrant children.
More than 160 million yuan (US$19 million) is invested each year
by Beijing municipal government to realize the right of migrant
children to an education, as stipulated in the Nine-Year Compulsory
Education Law. Chaoyang District invested 14 million yuan (US$1.69
million) to help 17,000 migrant children go to new schools in the
new semester. Only 43 schools for migrant children have qualified
and now have 30,000 students study there.
Supervision systems of a nine-year compulsory duration will
start this year. The supervision includes migrant children from six
to 16 years old to receive education. At the same time the
education fee of migrant children will be decreased from 500 yuan
(US$60) to 200 yuan (US$24) every semester in primary schools and
from 1,000 yuan (US$120) to 500 yuan in junior high schools.
(China.org.cn by Wu Nanlan, September 9, 2003)