VietNamNet Bridge – Operational state-owned nursery schools in HCM City can meet 30-50 percent of the demand only. Parents have been advised to send their children to private-run schools, but they don’t want to.

Phuong Hoa, who lives in district 3, said that she successfully purchased application forms for registering her child for Hoa Mai nursery school, but she is not sure if her child can get into the school.

“The school sold papers for registering to everyone who wanted to purchase them. The number of application forms sold does not coincide with the number of children it will accept,” Hoa said. She is worried that there will be no seat for her child at the school, because the school may prioritise other children whose parents have ‘good relations’ with the leaders of the school or ‘officials of higher levels’.

Luu Bich Phuong, Deputy Headmaster of Hoa Hong Nursery School, said that the school will enroll 90 children only for two classes this year. As a result, a lot of parents who queued up early in the morning on enrolment day, June 8, to register… wasted their time.

Nguyen Thi Kim Dung, Headmaster of May 19 Nursery School, said that though the school finished enrolling children for the 2009-2010 school year, she still receives parents these days asking the school to accept their children.

“The school announced that it enrolls 150 children, while there were 250 applications,” Dung said.

Parents told to send children to private schools

Thanh from the HCM City Education and Training Department said that all the schools in the city are overloaded as the number of children born in 2007, the Year of Golden Pig, is very high, while parents all want to send their children to state-owned schools.

Ward 3 in Go Vap district reportedly has 600 children who were born in 2007 and need to go to nursery school this year, while there are only two state-owned schools which enroll 200 children.

Thanh said that the lack of teachers and classrooms prove to be the biggest headaches. Pedagogical universities and colleges do not train teachers for nursery classes for 18-24 month olds, while they only produce teachers for kindergarten schools. Meanwhile, the plan to build 17 nursery schools in HCM City in 2008-2009 school year remains on paper for many reasons.

Thanh has advised parents to send their children to private-run schools or family-run classes.

However, not many parents want to follow Thanh’s advices because they don’t think that the schools can provide high education quality.

Quynh Nga, the owner of a private school in Tan Phu district in HCM City, said that most private schools just take care of children, while they do not have enough material facilities and teachers to teach the children.

VietNamNet/TT