Khmer students play traditional musical instruments at a boarding school (Photo: VNA)Soc Trang (VNA) – The MekongDelta province of Soc Trang has been upgrading infrastructure for schools inremote areas and Khmer communities as the new school year is only two weeksahead.
Chairman of the provincial People’s CommitteeTran Van Chuyen said in the 2017-2018 school year, the administration hadapproved funding for building and repairing nearly 940 classrooms and 150 otherfunction rooms at local schools, and procuring new educational equipment. Morethan 60 percent of the finance had been provided for schools in ethnic minorityareas.
Notably, Soc Trang has finished the constructionof the Tran De boarding school for ethnic minority students. The school, built attotal cost of over 30 billion VND (1.3 million USD), will be put into use inthe coming academic year.
Infrastructure building and upgrade have helpedimprove the educational quality. This also aims to help more schools meetnational standards when 244 or 44.4 percent of 549 schools in the province havebeen recognised as national-standard schools at present.
However, Chuyen also admitted that investmentsin school infrastructure in ethnic minority areas are modest compared to theset target.
From 2018 to 2020, Soc Trang will spend morethan 72 billion VND (3.1 million USD) on building 10 classrooms and 122 dormrooms to improve the learning and living conditions for ethnic students atboarding schools, he added.
Soc Trang has the largest number of Khmer peoplein Vietnam with more than 400,000, making up 31 percent of localpopulation.
The province has nine boarding schools forethnic minorities and 159 Vietnamese-Khmer bilingual schools with nearly146,800 students. –VNA
VNA
