HCM CITY– HCM City will need nearly 10,000 classrooms for 1.7 million students in the 2019-2020 academic year, according to the city’s Department of Education and Training.

Of the number, about 5,000 rooms will be needed for kindergartens and secondary schools.

As many as 410 projects on school construction have already been approved, and 7,800 classrooms are expected to be put into use by 2020.

The new rooms will provide at least half of the demand for classrooms at kindergarten and primary education levels.   

The shortage of classrooms at the primary education level is mostly in districts 12, Bình Tân, Gò Vấp, Tân Bình, Tân Phú, Thủ Đức and Hóc Môn.

The problem has been a lack of land. Planned land plots for building primary schools in the city’s districts is only 255 hectares, lower than real demand.   

Đỗ Đình Thiện, vice chairman of Bình Tân District People’s Committee, told Việt Nam News that the district was facing a shortage of funds as well.

The district would have to build 100 more primary schools by 2020, Thiện said, adding that the number of primary students had risen on average by 8,000 year on year in the last several years.

“Because of the shortage of classrooms, 42 primary students are studying in one classroom. The number exceeds the Ministry of Education and Training’s regulation of 35 in one classroom.”

Thiện said it was difficult to ensure that all primary students could study two shifts per day.

A new high school training programme, which will be carried out in the 2020-2021 academic year, will require two shifts per day. More classrooms will have to be built to ensure that students have room to study

More classrooms will be needed for the teaching of arts, science-technology, computers, and foreign languages at primary schools, and for physics, chemistry, and biology at high school.

In the 2018-2019 academic year, the city has more than 1.7 million students, an increase of 67,240 compared to the previous year, leading to pressure in ensuring enough classrooms.  

At a meeting of the People’s Council held late last year, the head of the Department of Planning and Architecture, Nguyễn Thanh Nhã, said the city’s land for the education sector was limited.

The department was working with the Ministry of Construction to devise a regulation about school construction to solve the classroom shortage, Nhã said.

The city, for instance, would be allowed to build high-storey schools to ensure a sufficient number of classrooms, while kindergartens could be built up to five storeys instead of three. Rooms at the fourth and fifth storey could be used for administration purposes.–VNS