VietNamNet Bridge - Summer services for children and students have mushroomed, offering different choices for parents. However, the service fees are very high and they seem not to be designed for the children from poor families.

The summer only reserved for children from rich families?

Children’s houses in HCM City have planned summer holiday activities, offering a lot of training courses in music, singing, dancing, and other kinds of sports. Also, students have also been offered special training courses in English, informatics and writing practice. There are many different training courses and different timetables for parents to choose. Especially, youth centers have set up long term plans for training life skills for students.

However, the parents with medium and low incomes say that the summer services provided by the organizations are not reserved for children from poor families.

Le Thi Mai, who lives in Phu Nhuan district in HCM City, wants to send her son to the “military semester” to be organized by the Southern Youth Center, so that the boy can have better self-discipline, better sense of life and learn to love parents more. However, Mai still has to think carefully about whether to send the son to the training course, because the fee would be four million dong at minimum.

Meanwhile, the required sums of money parents have to pay to join the summer camps of private schools and English centers are high enough to cause shock to low income earners. Lua, who has a son studying at the Me Linh Primary School, said that though the organizer advertised that students would attend a “summer camp”, they would mostly spend their time on learning and playing indoors and they only go camping for several days.

“I think with such a plan, the fee of 7 million dong is too high,” she said. International schools have also announced that they will organize training courses, where the schools will train live skills to students. However, the fees of the courses are very high between several hundreds dollars and 1000 dollar.

Every summer, the HCM City’s authorities release the documents instructing the city’s education departments to join forces with social organizations to organize useful activities for students.

However, most parents and students say that the activities prove to be monotonous and tedious, and that they do not feel interested in such activities. Meanwhile, the activities organized by private institutions prove to be unaffordable to poor children.

Where poor children should spend summer holiday?

Thanh Hien, a worker of N Garment Company in district 4 in HCM City, said that she has decided to spend 750,000 dong to send her child to a summer camp to be organized by the HCM City Labor Union.

“The city needs to organize more summer activities for workers’ children. If the city’s authorities rely on private schools to organize such activities, the children from poor families will never have summer holidays,” Hien said.

The organization board of the summer camp of the HCM City Labor Union has said that it has decided to receive more children for the camp, but all participants will have to pay fees. The HCM City Youth Union’s Committee has also announced that it will organize some summer camps for the children from workers’ families.

Children’s houses in HCM City also organize clubs for gifted students in some majors, offering low tuitions (180,000-200,000 per training course) and extracurricular activities. However, parents say the model just fits small children, while elder children will feel boring when attending the clubs.

Spending summer at pagodas has become a growing tendency among students. “Summer semester” at pagodas mainly aims at inspiring, reminding young people to think about traditions, teaching love, morality and the right awareness about life issues.

According to Superior Buddhist Monk, Thich Chan Tinh from Hoang Phap Pagoda in Hoc Mon district, the pagoda will receive 3000 children this year (7000 children registered in 2010).

Source: SGTT