The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Sinbei mayoral candidate, Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), has unveiled an ambitious new plan to benefit children by lengthening classroom hours, expanding the number of daycare centers and providing additional subsidies to families with young children.
Tsai showed off the new platform in an Internet advertisement posted on YouTube yesterday, a medium that is increasingly being put to use by her budget-conscious election campaign.
Under the plan, families that have caregivers for toddlers under the age of two will be eligible for a monthly subsidy of NT$3,000 from the municipal government in addition to the NT$3,000 monthly subsidy currently available from the central government.
She is also proposing to hire more teachers for elementary school students, increasing the ratio of teachers to classes from 1.5 teachers per class to 1.7 teachers per class, the same ratio used by neighboring Taipei City. Elementary school after hour activities would also see a one hour extension from 6pm to 7pm for the convenience of late-working parents.
Tsai pledged to create 300 new daycare centers in the next four years by encouraging participation from private operators, adding that she would also lobby for the nation’s mandatory nine-year education scheme to include an additional year of kindergarten in the future.
Campaign spokesperson Hsieh Hsin-ni (謝欣霓) said she expected young mothers like herself to be the primary benefactor of the policies.
Tsai’s plan follows an election pledge by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Eric Chu (朱立倫) last Sunday to build more local schools and prevent students from having to travel to Taipei City for their education.
The announcement comes as the two candidates are locked in a messy dispute over Chu’s record on the treatment of sewage water during his previous two terms as Taoyuan County commissioner.
Tsai’s deputy campaign chief Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦) yesterday accused Chu of ignoring Taoyuan’s basic infrastructure after revealing that less than 3 percent of the region’s households were connected to public sewage treatment facilities during his eight years in office.
Both candidates are currently polling less than a percentage point apart with Tsai at 39.8 percent and Chu at 39.2 percent, the latest poll by the Chinese-language China Times showed.
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