Chapter 5 Research Context
5.7 Care and Support of the Students
In general, students who board at school cannot leave the campus during school days without permission given by teachers. There is a security personnel living in his office during school days who is in charge of checking individuals entering and leaving the school: visitors need to register before entering the campus, students will not be allowed to leave the campus if no valid written request for leave is provided, and the electronic gate can only be opened by the security from inside of his office. The security office is right beside the school entrance gate.
Except for the role of carer arranged for kindergarten as well as grade 1 and 2 students, ‘Riverside’ is not staffed with a particular person who is in charge of the students’ daily life in the dormitories. The carers are responsible for helping children with their daily activities including getting dressed, personal cleanliness, eating in the canteen, going to bed and so on. For other students, it is either the person who is ‘the teacher in charge of the week’ or the home teacher of each class deals with issues in turn on a daily basis in the dormitories. One of the duties of ‘the teacher in charge of the week’ is to come to each dormitory room prior to bed time to make sure all students are ready to go to bed, then he/she will leave after a while if everything seems to be in order. The home teachers mainly come to the dormitory rooms before bed time to help ‘the teacher in charge of the week’ manage issues but may also come
112
around at other times to meet students. Students usually go to their home teachers first when they feel unwell, the home teacher then will decide what help the student might need: whether he/she needs to see a doctor or goes back home or simply stays in the dormitory room to rest. There is no doctor, nurse or other medical personnel in the dormitories. If students are really ill or there is any sort of an emergency, they could go to the local hospital to see a doctor which is very close to the school with only a 5-minute’s walking distance. Students also go to their home teachers if they have other needs, for example, girls in grade 9 sometimes go to their home teacher’s room on the same floor of their room to get drinking water as she has a water machine and she is always happy to help.
There is no place in the school for students to get showers or do laundry. I was told the previous principle had undertaken a project to build shower facilities that were provided by solar energy in the school; I have also seen those solar-energy facilities being left on the roof of the school canteen; but now for some reason, the current principle decided not to put them in use. Students therefore can only do basic personal cleanliness during school days and they usually take their dirty clothes back home on weekends or they simply do not change clothes for 5 days. I have witnessed how kindergarten students were organized by the carers to clean themselves before going to bed in the open area outside of the school canteen in the late afternoon: each of them used a small plastic washbowl to get water from the taps at the back of the canteen, then they put their washbowls on the lower stairs with themselves sitting on the higher stairs so that they could easily wash the feet after washing the face. The taps only provide cold water and there is no additional warm water provided for them.
113
There is a basketball court and a number of table tennis tables on playground 2. Playground 2 is the main place on the campus where students and staff have PE lessons and do sports. There is also a certain area on playground 2 where there is play equipment particularly for kindergarten pupils, including swings and slides and so on. During my stay, I have seen students playing basketball, badminton or table tennis in the afternoon extra-curriculum activity time; some teachers also use those sports facilities in the late afternoon. There was once or twice during my stay when ‘Riverside’ was organizing a teacher’s basketball match between ‘Riverside’ and another local school, students from all grades came out to watch the game and support their teachers in the afternoon activity time.
Apart from sports, students have very limited leisure time and have no access to radio, television and other forms of entertainment at school. Many students have mobile phones but they are not allowed to bring their phones to the school. If they are found to secretly use the phone at school, their phones will be confiscated until Friday when they leave school. Birthdays or other personal anniversaries are not celebrated at school.
The main access to drinking water for students is the water machine at the back of every classroom. A water machine is an equipment that by using which a plastic barrel of purified water has to be put upside down first and the front raised part of the barrel needs to be stuck in the hole on top of the machine, then one can get either hot water or cold water by pressing one of the two buttons on the machine. This machine is now very commonly used in China as the main drinking water supply equipment in a variety of places including offices and homes. Once one has got a machine, he or she just needs to order those water barrels from the water companies and get them delivered. In ‘Riverside’, a barrel of purified water is provided for
114
each class once a month and is collected from the school canteen by one of the student’s cadres whose position is called ‘commissary in charge of subsistence’. However, I noticed since the beginning of my stay, the water machine in grade 9 class was not in use for a long time with an old empty water barrel on top. Later I was told by the commissary in charge of subsistence of the class there has been 4 months that there was no water provided in the class. He went to the school canteen several times asking for a new water barrel, but the canteen staff told him there was not any, and no explanation was given and no one knows when there will be drinking water supply in the class again. During this period of time, students had to go to the small shop23 on the ground floor of the boys’ dormitory building and buy bottled mineral water which cost ¥1(10 pence) per bottle.
5.8 ‘Left-behind children’ in the School
The proportion of ‘left-behind children’ in the total number of students in ‘Riverside’ is nearly 90 percent. Among this ‘left-behind children’ cohort, nearly 95 percent have been ‘left behind’ by their migrant parents since they were very young and have been living with their grandparents since then. For most of them, the history of going to a boarding school can be traced back to their primary school years; and for some of them, the age when they started going to a boarding school was even as early as kindergarten.
For these young people, going to a boarding school or not has never been a choice for them, neither for their parents: there was only one primary school in their village before 2005; from 2006, the ‘Riverside Central Elementary school’ was the only school in the local region; and since 2008, the current ‘Riverside Comprehensive School’ has been remained as, still, the
23 This small shop is attached to the school and run by a teacher and his family. It mainly sells snacks and drinks with few varieties.
115
only school in ‘Riverside’ region. Therefore, going to a local state boarding school has always been the only option available for the majority of ‘Riverside’ residents.
Students usually leave school on Friday afternoons and return on Monday mornings before the first morning class begins. Most of them walk back home from school and walk to school from home every week as a result of few means of transportation available in the countryside. Most of students walk for about 1 hour between school and home and they usually have companions, either are their siblings who study in the same school or their friends who live in the same village. Some students are picked up by their family members, mostly the grandfather, by motorbike. There are students who leave in the most distant village and need to walk up to 2 hours in the mountain to reach school or home. Considering the time they have to be at school on Monday mornings (8:15), it is almost impossible for them to walk to school, especially in winter. Instead, they wake up very early (5am) in order to catch the mini-bus which passes by their village at a scheduled time. However, as this service is provided by self-employed individual bus owners, the mini-bus is not always stuck to schedule, so there are times that the students have to wait longer early on a cold dark winter morning.