Better teachers for kindergarten safety

ON MARCH 27, 23 kids at a private kindergarten in Jiaozuo, Central China's Henan province, suffered from food poisoning. According to the results of the police investigation, the cause was a teacher who put sodium nitrite, a kind of toxic chemical, into the porridge provided by the kindergarten because of a dispute with another teacher. Gmw.cn comments:

Sodium nitrite is highly toxic, and the maximum intake a human body can sustain is 0.3 grams at a time. The suspect has already been detained by the police and may face criminal charges, and the kindergarten involved has had its business suspended and its pupils are attending other kindergartens nearby. However, these are only temporary measures.

The incident should sound an alarm about kindergarten security. Some kindergartens have installed cameras to monitor the daily activities in the classrooms, but these cameras cannot help all the time. Sometimes they provide evidence after bad things happen, but they cannot always prevent them happening. That the teacher took the children as a target for revenge indicates that there is a big problem with the teacher.

To ensure the safety of young children and improve the quality of childcare, the most important thing is to improve the overall quality of the kindergarten team, with the key being better educated kindergarten teachers. This is easier said than done. According to research, by 2021, there will be a shortage of 2 million kindergarten teachers in China. The salaries for kindergarten teachers are so low that it is hard to attract enough applicants, never mind applicants with a good educational background.

Although the importance of teachers has been repeatedly emphasized, in the face of the reality of tight supply, the recruitment threshold has to be lowered. As a result, many kindergartens have low requirements for teachers. Some of them even have to recruit applicants without teaching licenses, who lack enthusiasm and the necessary training for the job. That's one of the key causes of such incidents.

The central government has introduced many policies in the past several years aimed at solving the problems in kindergartens. The trend of blindly seeking to profit from preschool education has been curbed, and more measures have been taken to encourage the opening of more affordable kindergartens. But private kindergartens need to be given equal treatment as their public counterparts in terms of preferential policies, financial subsidies and teacher development, and encouraged to raise the salaries they pay their teachers so as to improve the quality of childcare and give parents real peace of mind.