NBA Cares Legacy Project at the Chun Feng Migrant School in Beijing

(Post 1 of 2)

This past weekend I had the amazing opportunity of covering one of the NBA’s community outreach events in Beijing, where the NBA funded several improvements for Chun Feng Xue Xiao (Chun Feng School), a migrant school located in a small community outside the fifth ring of Beijing. These improvements included the refurbishment of the school courtyard, the construction of a new basketball court, and the renovation of their school library and donation of children’s reading material.

This update on the CSR event will be broken into two posts.
This post will highlight some of the issues that migrant children face in moving to the cities in China, and will also show some pictures of the school and students before the start of the NBA CSR event.

A later post will highlight the actual NBA CSR event, where the Denver Nuggets participated in an English reading program, and also held several basketball activities for the migrant school’s students.

The Issues That Migrant Children Face in China

(Research and Information from: People’s Daily Online, CCTV Online, Compassion for Migrant Children)

China has seen rapid growth and development in the last few decades; but the expansion of it’s major cities, like Beijing, was only made possible by the manpower provided by the large population of migrant workers that flocked to the cities from the rural parts of China, hoping for a better quality of life. Along with a dream for a better life, the migrant workers who came to the cities also hoped of a better education for their children in the urban public schools. Currently, Beijing alone is home to over 5 million migrant workers, and 500,000 migrant children.

Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult for migrant children to actually attend these public schools due to high tuition, and also the discrimination within the schools. Thus, migrant communities began to establish and build their own schools, where headmasters within these communities were willing to lower or even waive the tuition fees for the children in these migrant communities.

However, according to a 2007 report by the Beijing Bureau of Statistics, of the 297 migrant schools in Beijing at that time, only 58 of them had government authorization. The remaining 239 migrant schools without authorization receive no support from the government, and are in poor condition with a multitude of safety risks abounding within the food, transportation and school buildings.

The quality of education of these migrant schools is poor, and there are only a few migrant schools in Beijing that offer education up to the 9th grade. This large population of migrant children will find it increasingly difficult to catch up with the future demand for skilled labor, with the lack of equal education available to them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

-Duncan

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