By Liu Yi (刘怡)
News, page 5
Issue No. 561
Mar 19, 2012
Translated by Zhu Na
Original article:[Chinese]

Two-and-half-year-old Diandian (点点) already knows what it feels like to be a drop out.

 
In mid-February, a week before her tuition fees were due, her mother got a call from a teacher at the kindergarten saying that the preparatory classes that she attended with her daughter were going to be canceled.

 
Diandian had been enrolled at one of the public kindergartens in Beijing’s Xicheng District, paying 450 yuan a month for four hours of classes a week.

 
“This is a public kindergarten and is owned by the government, how can you just cancel the class?” she said, adding that it had been very tough to get a place on the preparatory course.

 
“Last July and August, it was very hot, almost every weekend I took Diandian to interview at parent-child classes run by kindergartens. Finally we got accepted by this one […]”

 
These preparatory classes have become common at public kindergartens after many primary schools introduced similar programs in order to deal with the competition for places.

 
Diandian’s mother has heard that kindergartens favor applications from children who attended the preparatory courses.

 
One head teacher from a public kindergarten in Beijing’s Chaoyang District said the courses aren’t run to make money.

 
“We hope to provide a transition period for children who are going to enter kindergartens,” the teacher said. “When the children attend the kindergarten, it’s rare for the children to cry when their parents leave.”

 
Kindergartens only have 248,000 places, whereas 416,000 babies were born in Beijing between 2007 and 2009.

 
Diandain’s mother also considered private kindergartens, but they were twice as expensive as the public ones. Instead, she chose the public option, which means overcoming a ratio of ten applicants to every place at a given kindergarten.

 
Diandan wasn’t the only dropout in Xicheng District – every single kindergarten's preparatory course was suspended.

 
Although Diandan’s mother didn’t know it when she got the kindergarten’s call, the closure had been triggered by a new policy introduced at the beginning of the year by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Finance. The policy document - The Interim Measures about Administration of the Kindergarten Fee Charges - prohibited kindergartens from charging “sponsorship” (赞助费) or admission fees, taking mandatory donations or using extra classes to collect additional fees.

 
However, the situation isn’t quite so simple, as Diandian’s mother learned from her next phone call from the kindergarten, which came a month later.

 
She was told that the classes would resume at community activity center in a residential block close to the kindergarten, but was also warned not to tell people that the classes were run by the kindergarten. Instead, she was told to say that they had been organized by the activity center.

 
Other than the location, nothing has changed - the tuition fees were still handed over to the kindergarten, the teachers were the same as at the kindergarten.

 
“We can understand why the kindergarten does this, whenever there’s a policy, there’s a way around it,” said Diandian’s mother, who now has to travel further to attend the classes. 

 
If the government’s new policy had already removed “sponsorship fees” – the extra payments that are taken from parents when their children get accepted to the kindergartens - then it would have caused a bigger impact.

 
For a typical Beijing kindergarten, these fees currently stack up to about 20,000 yuan to 40,000 yuan over three years.

 
On one online parenting forum that Diandian’s mother often visits, mothers have described how they intend to defer the start of their children’s education until September when they expect the government to crack down on sponsorship fees

 
Hearing this, Diandian’s mother, tells the other parents about how her daughter’s preparatory classes weren’t cancelled just relocated, explaining that “whenever there’s a policy, there’s a way around it”, so it is impossible to remove sponsorship fees.

 
Some people working in the education sector believe that kindergartens couldn’t survive without collecting extra fees.

 
“Since [the government] doesn’t cover the cost of preschool education, limiting the fees for kindergartens is equivalent to inviting guests but not paying the bill,” said Xin Lijian, the chairman of Xinfu Education Group.

The government’s new policy also calls for investments to build new kindergartens and expand old ones and says that the number of kindergartens in Beijing should approach 1,530 by 2013 with public kindergartens serving 65 percent of the market.

Links and Sources
The Economic Observer Cash and Contacts Open School Door