Sichuan Quake Relief (SQR)

Qingchuan County, northern Sichuan.

After the earthquake destroyed many of the local village schools in Qingchuan County, it was decided that rather than rebuild each small school, a large central school would be built in the nearest town. Unfortunately, for many of these villages the nearest town could be more than twenty kilometres away, along roads that have frequently been blocked by landslides, or made inaccessible by local rivers bursting their banks during the rainy season.

Some of the villages that have lost their local schools in Qingchuan County, along with the nearest towns.

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Villages such as Liping, Yanyan, Minzhu and Shuimo have all been told that their school-age children must now attend the central school in Qima Town. For some parents, this means sending their child to board at the school — a cost of 120 RMB a month; for many, it means renting a place in Lijiaguo, close to Qima, costing up to 600 RMB a month including food and utilities. That’s around 6000 RMB per academic year in a region where annual earnings are approximately half that amount. This kind of expense cannot be borne for long, and already more than half of the students from these villages are staying at home instead of going to the central school, receiving no schooling whatsoever.

The situation is the same all over the county: students from Heping Village — some two hundred of them — must not only travel by road, but spend forty minutes on the river in order to reach Yingpan Central Primary School; Jinjiaping is three or four hours walk away from Maoba Central Primary School; Sandui is five kilometres along mountain roads from Shazhou. The list goes on.

The villagers overwhelmingly want their own local schools to be rebuilt; impressively, more than thirteen villages in Qingchuan County have won an agreement from the local education bureau that, provided they find the funding to rebuild the school themselves, then teachers will be supplied and the school will be permitted run.

The people of Liping have led the way in raising money, from within their own community and from companies further afield, and succeeded in building a 120-square-metre school — more than enough to educate all of the local children and with room to grow. But they were aghast to be told, when they applied for the permit to begin operations, the education bureau had apparently specified that village schools must be larger than 200 square metres in order to qualify. No-one had heard of this restriction while the school was being planned.

Further confusion ensued when the representatives from Yanyan — a village that had had its own school for almost fifty years before the quake — started work on their own plans for a school, necessarily bigger than 200 square metres, only to be told that it must be at least 300 square metres if it was to be allowed to hire teachers, despite being barely six kilometres (as the crow flies) from Liping. People started to wonder if the central school in Qima was having a hand in these policy-switches in order to keep as many students (and with them, more funding) for themselves.

But the people in Liping could not bear the thought of their time, money, and hard work going to waste — not to mention choosing between struggling to afford to send their child to the central school, or having no education at all. They pleaded with the education bureau to overlook the size-restriction and — thanks in large part to a relative of the community being an employee at the bureau — they were at last granted the permit. Classes will begin again at Liping Village Elementary School from next semester.

The other villages we have mentioned are not so lucky to have friends in high places, and are stuck either wondering if they should risk going ahead to rebuild a school that may not be permitted to run, or struggling to locate the funds to rebuild their own schools at all. SQR is monitoring the situation to determine if anything can be done for these other villages, collectively or individually.