The Taipei City Government yesterday announced a plan to hold a joint recruitment for senior high schools with the Taipei County Government and Keelung City Government, opening 14,000 spots for students who applied for the exam-free admission program.
The joint recruitment program was part of the “one-guideline, single textbook” policy adopted by the three local governments. The policy was proposed by Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) to reduce the burden of students by standardizing textbooks, while attracting more students to attend local schools via the joint recruitment plan.
Director of Taipei City’s Department of Education Kang Tsung-hu (康宗虎) said the students who participated in the joint recruitment program could apply for schools in the three areas.
However, current open admission programs in the three areas will remain in place, as some schools in the three areas still worry about students applying for prestigious schools such as Taipei Jianguo High School and Taipei First Girl’s High School in Taipei City.
With the implementation of the joint recruitment program, there will be four exam-free admission programs available for students who are attending senior high schools, Kang said.
“The three local governments went through a lot of negotiations before deciding on the details of the joint recruitment program. We encourage students to attend high schools that are near home,” he said.
Under the joint program, students will submit their average grades from junior high school. The three local governments will form a joint admission committee to handle the admission.
The Taipei City Teachers Association yesterday, however, slammed the three local governments, saying they had rushed the joint recruitment program, and urged the governments to present a comprehensive plan before implementing the program.
The association said the Taipei City Government had left schoolteachers, parents and students in the dark because it failed to explain the program to them.
“There are already many exam-free programs, and adding one more program will only confuse students and parents even more,” the association said in a written statement.
“Besides, these programs did not ease the burden on students,” the association added.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching