Lesson 3: Accelerating school construction

Although the shortage of schools still exists, the appearance of schools in Hanoi has changed positively when many schools were newly built and repaired. With the active participation and investment of the City Party Committee, People's Council, People's Committee of Hanoi and districts, the network of schools in the capital has continued to develop recently, contributing to reducing the shortage of schools.

On August 27, 2024, Ba Dinh District held a ceremony to attach a district-level project plaque to Thu Le Primary School. The project was carried out on the land of the old school on Dao Tan Street, Ngoc Khanh Ward, with an area of ​​2,380 ^m2 , a scale of 7 floors, 38 classrooms for more than 1,000 students. The school has full modern and synchronous classrooms and functional rooms according to the standards of facilities of a national standard school level II. The total investment of the project is more than 105.2 billion VND.

Another school was awarded the district-level construction project on August 15, 2024, which is Vo Thi Sau Primary School (Vinh Tuy Ward, Hai Ba Trung District). The school was approved by the People's Committee of Hai Ba Trung District with a total investment of nearly 88 billion VND on an area of ​​nearly ^4,000m2 . Construction started in early January 2023 and was completed on July 10, 2024. Vo Thi Sau Primary School was completed in time to meet the requirements for the new school year and on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Liberation of the Capital. The school has a scale of 20 classrooms, 6 functional rooms, 1 physical education floor; fully equipped with modern facilities and teaching equipment that meet the prescribed standards; contributing to meeting the practical needs of Vinh Tuy ward residents, improving the quality of life and creating a change in the appearance of the district.

In mid-May 2024, the People's Committee of Ba Dinh District decided to establish Giang Vo 2 Secondary School on the basis of separating Giang Vo Secondary School. According to the plan of Ba Dinh District, in the 2024-2025 school year, Giang Vo 2 Secondary School will enroll 7 6th grade classes with 315 targets. Separating Giang Vo Secondary School will both maintain the quality brand of Giang Vo Secondary School; at the same time, it will also create a breakthrough for the key education of Ba Dinh District.

In addition to Giang Vo 2, in the 2024-2025 school year, the spacious and modern Nguyen Trai Secondary School - Ba Dinh will also be put into operation. Teacher Mai Thi Phu - Vice Principal of the school shared: "Parents and students are very excited that the new school will be put into operation from this school year. The spacious school, modern equipment and fully equipped functional rooms, physical rooms, will certainly create good conditions for teachers and students to teach and increase students' motivation in studying".

Excited that her child was transferred to Ha Dong Secondary School - a newly inaugurated public school, Ms. Dinh Thu Ha, a resident of Huyndai building - Ha Dong, said: "Previously, when I knew that public schools in the area often had a large class size of more than 50 students, I sent my child to a private school, accepting the high cost. But this year, Ha Dong Secondary School is both clean and beautiful, and has met the standards, so I immediately transferred my child to a school near my house. Taking my child to class, my child and I are extremely satisfied with everything here. Hanoi's public schools are as beautiful as international schools."

Previously, in October 2023, Trau Quy Secondary School, Gia Lam District was officially completed and handed over. With a total investment of nearly 130 billion VND, the school is designed in a modern style with 5 large-scale buildings including: 36 classrooms, administrative area, functional area, gymnasium, dining room and auxiliary items (gate, fence, garage, guard house, pumping station, gathering yard, sports field, trees, lawns, etc.). Each classroom and functional area is invested with synchronous equipment according to current standards.

The above schools are among many newly built and renovated schools and classrooms in recent years. With the encouraging results in developing Hanoi's school network, especially before the 2024-2025 school year, Director of the Hanoi Department of Education and Training Tran The Cuong shared: "Never before have there been such favorable conditions for expanding the network and building and repairing new schools and classrooms as there are now. As soon as the 2023-2024 school year ended, districts, towns and schools in the city urgently implemented many projects to renovate, repair, upgrade, as well as build additional classrooms, especially in schools in densely populated areas, to prepare for the 2024-2025 school year."

Dr. Nguyen Tung Lam, Vice President of the Vietnam Association of Psychology and Education, commented: Recently, the Hanoi Party Committee, People's Council, and People's Committee have had the right policy of allocating a large budget to invest in education, a significant increase compared to the previous period. Thanks to that, the system of public schools in Hanoi has increased in quantity while ensuring beauty and modernity in quality. The city has directed the People's Committees of districts, towns, and cities to take advantage of available land to build new and expand the school system.

The scale of schools in Hanoi is constantly growing. According to the latest statistics from the Hanoi Department of Education and Training, in the 2024-2025 school year, Hanoi will have a total of 2,913 schools (an increase of 39 kindergartens and general schools compared to the same period last year) with nearly 2.3 million students, more than 70,000 classes (an increase of about 48,000 students compared to the same period last year) and 130,000 teachers; there are 29 vocational education - continuing education centers, 1 school for training and fostering management staff.

Sharing the efforts to develop the school system, Vice Chairman of Tay Ho District People's Committee Bui Thi Lan Phuong said: "Always identifying education as the spearhead, in recent years, Tay Ho District has allocated investment capital to renovate, upgrade, expand and build new schools according to the plan to develop the school network in the period of 2016-2020, vision 2030 and supplement teaching equipment in the period of 2021 - 2025, with a total investment of 45 projects of nearly 2,200 billion VND. The district has allocated land to build 8 new schools in densely populated wards, aiming to reduce the size of classes/schools, reduce the number of students/class, meet the requirements for new construction and maintain schools that meet national standards. Along with that, the district is preparing to build a new high school in Nhat Tan ward with a total investment of more than 300 billion VND and 2 high schools are in the process of renovation and upgrading (Chu Van An High School, Tay Ho High School). With the adjusted plan, by 2045, the district will continue to add and build 8 new schools.

Regarding the decentralization of school construction, according to Resolution 02/NQ-HDND on supplementing the 5-year medium-term public investment plan 2021-2025 for projects in 3 areas (education, health, relics), the People's Committees of districts, towns and cities are the investors in building public schools at all levels. On that basis, the Department of Education and Training requests the People's Committees of districts, towns and cities to prioritize investing resources to build public schools that meet national standards; maintain and improve the criteria of schools that have been recognized as meeting national standards.

At the explanation session on the construction of public schools meeting national standards and investment, renovation and construction of new kindergartens and general schools in Hanoi held in mid-October 2023, discussing solutions to overcome the shortage of schools, including national standards schools, Chairman of Hoang Mai District People's Committee Nguyen Minh Tam said that the solution is to have sufficient conditions in terms of land and capital. Regarding the increase in the number of public schools, Hoang Mai District has reviewed and urgently deployed planned land plots for investment in school construction. At the same time, proactively reported to the City to decentralize to the district to adjust planning indicators; revoke slow-to-implement projects to prioritize school construction. The district has allocated over 50% of basic construction investment capital to build schools.

The Chairman of the People's Committee of Hoang Mai District proposed that the City pay attention to supporting the implementation of investment in building schools; when the City approves the planning of urban areas, it is necessary to stipulate the proportion of public schools in urban areas. In addition, the City integrates and adjusts the planning of the Capital Law this time to arrange to increase the density of the school network in accordance with the current population growth rate.

Faced with this challenge, Associate Professor, Dr. Bui Thi An said: The key here is to do a good job of planning. The Capital Region Planning and the Capital Law 2024 have been approved. For standard planning, the implementation process must be disciplined, must be done correctly, and must not be broken up; and apartments must not be built too densely because it will lead to failure to meet social infrastructure conditions. What needs to be done is to review all infrastructure, including educational infrastructure; population density distribution in districts, review school-age students, and forecast population growth rates to proactively grasp the situation.

Along with that, there must be solutions to improve the quality of suburban schools through investment in facilities and teaching staff; attracting good teachers to the suburbs so that people can feel secure in sending their children to study there; avoiding overloading of schools in the inner city. In addition, there must be a mechanism to encourage the socialization of education in inner-city areas and areas lacking schools, provided that these schools are within the planning and have tuition fees suitable to the economic conditions of the people.

Dr. Nguyen Tung Lam, Vice President of the Vietnam Association of Psychology and Education, said that part of the reason for this problem is that the city is still building schools according to a construction plan set out long ago, which is not in line with the actual population fluctuations. To overcome this, the city should give local authorities the right to supervise the construction of apartment buildings; only allow apartment buildings to operate and open for sale when there is full school and hospital infrastructure, meeting the needs of people living in that apartment building; and resolutely not let the situation of selling houses before building school infrastructure and health care systems happen. If the local budget is not enough to build public schools, instead of waiting for the city, the locality has the right to assign local land to investors for the purpose of building schools. At that time, private school tuition fees will be significantly reduced, with less difference in tuition fees with public schools as at present, creating favorable conditions for students to study.

In terms of construction, reality shows that to speed up the progress of school construction, there must be a strong spirit in the direction; typically in Hoang Mai district. In July 2023, Chairman of the City People's Committee Tran Sy Thanh chaired an inspection of the progress of building public schools that meet national standards and slow-progress and slow-implementation school socialization investment projects in this district. Here, the Chairman of the City People's Committee and the working delegation inspected the land plots handed over from the Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUD) to build public schools in Hoang Liet ward; inspected the progress of the Tan Mai Primary - Secondary School construction project (Tan Mai ward) and inspected the socialized construction project at the kindergarten land plot (code NT), the primary school land plot (code TH) with a total area of ^{​​13,643.7m2} in the Ao Sao urban functional area (Thinh Liet ward).

Affirming the city's viewpoint of paying attention, prioritizing, and allocating resources to remove obstacles for Hoang Mai, helping the district develop rapidly in the field of education, the Chairman of the City People's Committee suggested that the district continue to review all land funds in urban areas, and study and recover vacant land or land that is slow to develop to prioritize school construction, striving to complete it in 2023. The good news is that in the past 2 years, Hoang Mai district has started to build 17 new schools; in 2024, 4 public schools were inaugurated, contributing to reducing the pressure on school enrollment, solving the number of classes and places for children of local people.

Along with that, by promoting the application of IT in primary school enrollment and the strong direction of the leaders of the Ministry of Education and Training, the Hanoi People's Committee and the Department of Education and Training, in the enrollment season of the 2024-2025 school year, 100% of schools in the city have conducted online enrollment and admission, completely ending the situation of queuing, jostling and pushing in enrollment. Here, the enrollment zoning and communication work about enrollment zoning to the people also play an extremely important role, contributing to stabilizing the annual primary school enrollment situation.

Concluding the session explaining the work of building public schools that meet national standards and investing, renovating and building new kindergartens and general schools in Hanoi, Chairman of the City People's Council Nguyen Ngoc Tuan pointed out a number of contents that need to be implemented, such as focusing on overall review, developing detailed plans, clearly assigning responsibilities, tasks, roadmaps and implementation solutions; at the same time, requesting the City People's Committee to direct departments, branches, districts, towns and cities to review, update and well implement the planning and land allocation for school construction, especially public schools that meet national standards; review and speed up the progress of public school construction investment projects according to Resolution No. 02 of the City People's Council, especially new construction projects to soon overcome the shortage of schools and classes. The City also needs to promptly direct the removal of obstacles and difficulties; Prioritize balancing and supplementing capital sources to support districts with many difficulties, the rate of schools meeting standards is still low compared to the city's average.

The Chairman of the City People's Council requested investors to urgently, seriously, and speed up the progress of school projects in the city. For investors who deliberately delay or have poor capacity, resolutely withdraw them and hand them over to the People's Committees of districts, towns, and cities to develop projects to build public schools. In addition, review and speed up the relocation of production facilities that are not in accordance with planning and cause environmental pollution out of the inner city, and reserve land for building social infrastructure, with priority given to building schools.

(to be continued)

13:28 08/31/2024

Source: https://kinhtedothi.vn/bai-3-tang-toc-xay-truong.html