The safety of nearly 17,000 elementary and junior-high school students could be in jeopardy, as they are studying in school buildings that need to be demolished, the Control Yuan said.
The government watchdog issued the warning on Saturday, one year after it demanded that the Ministry of Education and local governments address the issue of unsafe school buildings because “life is priceless.”
At the time, the Control Yuan found that a total of 111 school buildings in Taipei did not have a construction permit and 120 lacked a building occupation permit. To date, only five of them have obtained occupation permits and another five have applied for them.
In addition, 11 buildings are undergoing reconstruction, two have been designated as historical sites, one has been torn down and one has been green-lighted for reconstruction, statistics showed.
In New Taipei City, of the 197 buildings at 82 schools that failed to acquire an occupation permit, 59 underwent a seismic evaluation last year. Of these, 49 were deemed to be in need of structural reinforcement, one was recommended for demolition and nine were considered not to require structural reinforcement.
This year, 24 school buildings in the municipality that did not require or had completed structural reinforcement have applied for the issuance of permits they lack, statistics showed.
In central Taiwan, 17 buildings at 13 schools in Taichung were deemed to be in need of improvement, with renovations only completed on one building last year, with schools set to undertake the necessary renovations on the remaining 16 this year.
Work on school buildings in Yunlin County has proceeded at a similarly slow pace, with only one of 35 buildings at 25 schools found to be without an occupation permit being torn down, 17 having undergone structural reinforcement and two being designated cultural and historical sites.
In Kaohsiung, 15 elementary schools and 10 junior-high schools have torn down and reconstructed buildings that did not have occupation permits over the past three years. In Tainan, just 12 of the 210 school buildings lacking an occupation permit have filed for the document.
In response to the Control Yuan, K-12 Education Administration Director Wu Ching-shan (吳清山) said the Executive Yuan had allocated a fund of NT$8 billion (US$256.98 million) for the structural improvement of public schools.
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:
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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