The Ministry of Education has approved the opening of two classes for 10th-grade students by the Dongguan School for Taiwan Businessperson's Children (東莞台商子弟學校) in Guangdong Province starting in September next year, a ministry official said yesterday.
The Dongguan School, set up in September last year, is the first school for Taiwanese children in China. At present the school has four kindergarten classes, 20 elementary school classes and seven junior high school classes, but no high school class.
There are 96 children enrolled in the kindergarten, 646 students in the elementary school and 243 in the junior high school, says Wu Canyang (吳燦陽), the school's principal.
Wu said that among the school's 29 junior high school graduates last summer, 13 returned to Taiwan to continue their education, while the others either entered a Chinese high school or went to Singapore to attend high school.
But the opening of the two 10th-grade classes in September, Wu said, means junior high school graduates will be able to continue their education at the Dongguan School.
The school is expected to admit three classes of new high school students each year, according to Wu.
He said that in the first semester the school had enrolled more than 700 students, which was far more than the 500 the school had planned on.
As the number of students who would be attending the school by the year 2005 may exceed 2,000, new classrooms and school facilities are being constructed.
The Dongguan School is subsidized by the Ministry of Education and offers courses comparable to those offered in Taiwan's education system. Since the teachers and the teaching materials are mostly from Taiwan, school graduates would not have much trouble continuing their studies in Taiwan, Wu pointed out.
Taiwanese children in the Dongguan area can have such a school mainly because of the efforts of the large numbers of Taiwanese businesspeople working there.
The chairman of the school board, Yeh Hung-teng (葉宏燈), is the former chairman of the Taiwan Businessperson's Association in Dongguan. Since its formation in October 1993, the 2,169-member association had made the school project a major goal.
In order to establish this kind of "private" school, the association needed the support of authorities on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
After years of negotiations, the school's preparatory committee received approval from the Guangdong Provincial Government in October 1999 to establish a school with a status similar to that of an international school.
The Dongguan School is unique in China because it is allowed to have a principal and teachers from Taiwan as well as using Taiwanese textbooks.
RSS