Schools getting called out on extra charges
School leaders have been threatened by the Hanoi Education and Training Department that they will be strictly punished if they collect fees and charges that do not comply with current regulations. Meanwhile, schools have complained that they do not have enough money to upgrade material facilities and improve teaching quality.
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How much is enough to run a school?
Nguyen Gia Thieu High School is one of the biggest schools in Long Bien and Gia Lam districts in Hanoi. The school has 46 classes with over 2,000 students. In the 2008-2009 school year, the school collected 40,000 dong from every student for the so-called ‘school upgrading fee’.
The sum of 80 million dong, according to Dang Dinh Dai, Headmaster of Nguyen Gia Thieu High School, is not enough to paint the whole school.
“80 million dong is just enough to paint the four-storey building, while the school has two two-storey buildings that also need painting because they are peeling,” Dai said.
Regarding the tuition, the school is allowed to collect 270,000 dong from every student for nine months of learning, which means that it gets 540 million dong per annum from tuition. Under the current regulations, the school has to use 216 million dong of the 540 million dong to pay teachers.
The biggest ‘money supply source’ the school has been relying on is the state budget. It gets 3.76 billion dong every year for regular expenses, while 80 percent of the sum is paid to teachers.
As such, the school only has one billion dong in total with which to cover all expenses of the school, including electricity and water bills, pay for teachers and the upgrading of material facilities.
According to Dai, the official payrolls of all schools only include several school staffs, including security officers, accountants, cashiers, health-care workers and laboratory officers.
Meanwhile, four security officers are not enough for a big school like Nguyen Gia Thieu. It would overload a health-care worker to work from 6.45 am to 5 pm. A laboratory officer should serve 28 classes only, while there are 46 classes at Nguyen Gia Thieu School.
It depends on ‘money-spending skill’ of headmasters
Dai, and many other headmasters in Hanoi, admitted that the set budgets for Hanoi’s education are higher than the allocated budgets for other localities, which means that they well understand that they cannot claim higher budgets.
In principle, schools can have more money to upgrade material facilities and improve teaching quality if they increase tuition. However, tuition levels have remained unchanged for ten years, while expenses have increased.
For example, previously, there were only two lamps for every classroom, while there are now 10 lamps. Nowadays, computers are being used at every school, while computers were not present at schools 10 years ago.
A leader of Tran Hung Dao-Thanh Xuan High School pointed out that the monthly tuition a high school student has to pay is just equal to the sum of money for two bowls of pho and equal to the sum of money he has to pay for two hours of extra lessons.
That explains why many schools have to collect additional fees and charges which are not stipulated in the current regulations, such as the bicycle-keeping fee, classroom cleaning fee.
When asked if the allocated budget is enough for schools, Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai, Senior Official of the Hanoi Education and Training Department, said that this is really a difficult-to-answer question. If the headmasters can stretch their limited budgets, they still can run schools well, but if they organise a lot of activities, they will lack money.
Source:vietnamnet.vn
