The Ministry of Education plans to spend the next 12 years building 150 new school swimming pools and renovating 150 existing ones to help students improve their swimming, a ministry official said yesterday.
Wang Chun-chuan (王俊權), director of the ministry’s Department of Physical Education, told the ministry’s annual meeting of educational bureau directors in Miaoli that the ministry plans to spend NT$3.9 billion (US$122 million) to build 50 new school pools and to turn 50 existing cold-water pools into heated ones between this year and 2013.
Part of the budget would be spent on recruiting 3,600 swimming coaches at schools, Wang said.
There are only 373 school swimming pools nationwide, while 146 townships do not have a pool, ministry statistics showed.
The ministry’s aim is for students to be able to swim 15m by the time they graduate from elementary school, 25m when they graduate from junior high school and 50m upon graduation from high school, Wang said.
Wang said the ministry hopes that up to 55 percent of elementary and junior high school students would be able to swim by 2013, compared with 42 percent last year.
The ministry’s ultimate goal is to ensure that 80 percent of the elementary and junior high school students can swim by 2022, Wang added.
The ministry also proposed that junior high school graduates who can swim be granted bonus points when applying for high school places, Wang said.
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