The latest baby boom that emerged in the Year of the Dragon is starting to show its effects in the fierce competition for school places. Over the past weekend, several popular local kindergartens have seen lines of anxious parents queuing at the gates eager to secure a place for their newly-school age baby dragons.
Although some kindergartens only started to distribute registration forms yesterday morning, parent lineups had reportedly appeared as early as Friday.
Over a hundred people had queued outside a premier school affiliated to Hou Kong Middle School Friday evening, following oversubscription for school places and a limit on applications.
Holding her three-year old daughter in her arms, Ms Si Tu reluctantly joined the lineup at Hou Kong and queued overnight. On Sunday, the family went out again to check their preferred schools one by one.
“I had to bring her to the overnight queue, otherwise no-one could look after her. We don’t want to take her wandering around either, but there’s nothing else we can do in this situation,” she told the Times.
Responding to the overnight queues, some kindergartens launched online forms for download while some announced a cancellation of the ceiling on the forms’ distribution and submission.
The Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (DSEJ) also tried to ease parents’ anxiety by reiterating that there are “sufficient” school places for the baby boomers.
According to DSEJ, there are 59 schools offering a total of 7,900 kindergarten spaces in the new academic year, whereas the estimated number of new students is 1,500 fewer.
Nevertheless, many families still chose “the more secured approach” of queuing, vying to pick up the forms as soon as the gates of their preferred schools were open.
A lineup of some hundred parents outside the kindergarten affiliated to Chan Sui Ki Perpetual Help College refused to dissipate on Saturday night, even though the school had decided to cancel its pervious limit on applications.
“It’s not that we parents want to make it this insane, but the government didn’t plan it well and now it’s such a messy situation where we won’t know if the child has been admitted until after one to two months’ waiting,” Ms Si stressed. “We’ve been worried sick that our child would miss out on a school place. We can only rest assured when we have registered her at five or six schools,” she said.
She said so far they’ve only signed up at the Hou Kong premier school, as the family “couldn’t reach the conditions to register for others.” “Because we don’t have a computer at home,” she explained, staring at a notice board at the closed gate of the Colegio de St. Rosa de Lima.
“Some schools, like this one, restrict the registration by requesting online registration mandatorily. We want to register at the Sacred Heart College because we live nearby, but it only offers forms online,” the mother complained.
In Macau, Catholic schools such as the Sacred Heart College and the Perpetual Help College are usually a popular choice for infant education, as well as kindergartens that are operated by traditional associations.
The Fu Luen School, opened by the Women’s General Association, is one of the hot spots. Its supervisor, Ms Wong Lai Heng, told the Times that when choosing kindergartens, parents would mostly consider the ones that are renowned or close to home.
“Macau’s Catholic schools usually pay more importance to English language and bilingual teaching. Another advantage is that they usually offer an integrated system from kindergarten to high school level so the students don’t need to transfer,” she explained.
“Speaking overall, every school in Macau has its own features in operation. Besides considering the teaching quality, parents also want a school climate where children are taught to be reasonable and well behaved in society, they can see the children in school uniforms in the streets,” the supervisor added.
For Mr Liang, the father of a new immigrant family, the ethos of the integrated system especially resonated. “The admission to kindergarten is the most important admission for the child, because basically the child can move up to primary school, middle school until high school levels within one school’s own system. So you must get into the good ones for the fist-time admission, otherwise you have to apply again when reaching the next level,” he stressed.
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