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Back To School? Not For Half A Million Disabled Kids In China

Many migrant families live in the shadows of society.
Many migrant families live in the shadows of society.
Zhou Tian

BEIJING — While September is the moment for most children go back to school or start for the first time, more than 80% of the approximately 500,000 school-aged disabled children from China's migrant families have never been schooled.

Twenty Chinese organizations have just published a public letter calling on the Ministry of Education to change the country’s Education Bill of Individuals with Disabilities to enable children with disabilities from migrant families to enroll in the schools closest to their homes.

The letter also urged the authority to reduce the discretionary rights of schools and add provisions to penalize those that reject these children, while also providing targeted public aid to migrant parents with disabled children.

The letter notes some improvement in recent years for many of the millions of rural families that have moved into China's cities, including easier enrollment at their neighborhood schools. And yet these advances have not reached families with disabled children, who have even greater need for services.

Due to China's household registration system, migrant families aren't officially recognized as local residents and therefore aren't covered by the local authority's preferential policy. Whether it's for entry into special schools, special classes or regular classes, disabled children are almost always directly or indirectly refused.

The schools possess a disproportionate power of discretion, and migrant families with disabled children have no effective way to get help.

A broken system

According to data about the disabled population from China’s National Bureau of Statistics and the China Migrant Population Development Report 2013, it's estimated that about two million handicapped children between six and 14 years old were illiterate in 2006. That means this disadvantaged group's illiteracy rate is as high as 81.3%. And in 2012, there were still 410,000 school-aged children with disabilities from migrant families, out of the national total of half a million, who had never been schooled.

According to Deng Qinggao, a staff member at the Xiamen Promise Of Love Information Consulting Organization, an NGO, ordinary schools typically push all disabled children to enroll in special schools catering to children with intellectual disabilities. But these schools are not designed for children who have just physical disabilities. Worse still, even these special schools often refuse students under the pretext that these youngsters are "incapable of taking care of themselves."

Though there is no law supporting the rejection of disabled children, Chinese schools set their own criteria for acceptance, which vary greatly from one to the next.

Meanwhile, parents lack legal support to defend their offspring's right simply because there is no relevant law to punish schools that refuse to take in these children, and China's 1994 Education Bill of Individuals with Disabilities is sorely out-of-date.

Yet again, the source of this particular problem is in the constraints of the household registration system, and the school registration that comes with it. Even public school enrollment of non-disabled migrant children is much lower than enrollment for local children. Often, as they get older, students are forced to return to the rural areas where their family's household is registered. Otherwise, in a majority of cities, they won't be allowed to sit for the college entrance exam later.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War

Why Western F-16s Are Key To Ukraine's Counteroffensive

President West has pledged to deliver F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine and train pilots. Kyiv hopes the jets will swing the fighting in its favor as it prepares its counter-offensive reports independent Russian news outlet Vazhnyye Istorii.

Why Western F-16s Are Key To Ukraine's Counteroffensive

A U.S. Navy flight deck crew sailor watches a fighter jet's routine operation.

-Analysis-

KYIV — After the U.S. announced it will help train Ukrainians on F-16 fighter jets in late May, Yuriy Ignat, spokesman for the Ukrainian air force command, confidently declared: "Once we have the F-16s, we'll win this war."

Military experts argue that it may not be as simple as that, but for military pilot instructor and Ukrainian reserve colonel, Roman Svitan, the Western fighters could help cut Ukrainian casualties and even shift the balance in Ukraine's favor during the counteroffensive.

Ukraine is gearing up to expel the Russian forces that have invaded its territory. While the specifics of the counteroffensive are shrouded in secrecy, and experts continue to debate the likelihood of its success, it appears that the long-term objective is reclaiming all the territories currently occupied by Russia, including Crimea and the Donbas region.

Speaking to the independent Russian news site Important Stories, Roman Svitan explains how the F-16s could help Ukraine achieve this objective.

For starters, Ukraine can reach the Azov coast in the southeast under the protection of surface-to-air missile systems and sufficient artillery cover, Svitan explains.

“The ground is as flat as a table," he notes, "so it's easy to pull equipment like artillery there."

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