Improve Educational Equity in Rural China

Dear Donors,

This time we would like to share with you the story of the children at Baiye Elementary School. Baiye is located in Zhaoan County, Fujian Province. In 1997, a company from Xiamen donated an academic building to the school, giving it a total floor area of 1200 square meters. However, because of of its isolated location and various other reasons, at present the school only has five classes, three pre-school with 62 students, one first-grade and one second-grade with 40 students in total. Only five teachers are available to these children, and they have only broken blackboards and chalks as tools for teaching, for that no additional funding has been available for maintenance or new classroom equipment since the school building was put to use.

At the end of last year, our volunteers visited Baiye and decided to provide the children with more learning resources. This March, the first batch of books arrived at Baiye. The children are very young (under ~7) but well-mannered. They listened quietly while the volunteers introduced the books to them, waited patiently for the books to be distributed into their hands, and became immersed in the books immediately. The picture books were their favorites right now because they have not yet learned how to read most of the words, but their faces revealed great curiosity toward the contents that they could not understand. This is a hopeful start for the children and us.

According to one of the senior teachers at Baiye, there are as many as 1600 school-age children around the area and the school has quite a potential to grow. We truly look forward to cooperating with Baiye in the future. As always, thank you for all your help and kindness for making our project possible.

Sincerely,

Overseas China Education Foundation

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