Two boys eat their lunch of a chicken leg and noodles with shredded meat, at a school in Xincai county, Henan province, on Tuesday. A total of 120,000 rural students in the province are benefiting from a nutrition improvement program subsidized by the government. Zhao Xuefeng / for China Daily

 

The Education Department in Hunan province dismissed five people who were found to have provided insufficient food to students in the government-subsidized lunch program.

The five people - two from the Education Department and three from a primary school - were sacked by the government because the primary school gave small quantities of food to students, the Fenghuang county education bureau said in a statement on Monday.

The bureau will take more measures to supervise the supply of its "nutritious lunch" to make sure the students all get a full meal, the statement said.

Liang Xuye, a teacher at Suode Primary School, complained on her micro blog in late October that each student in the county received only one slice of 20-gram bread and a bottle of 200-ml milk for lunch, which is not nearly enough to meet a child's nutritional needs.

Liang, 20, a junior from Jiaxing University of Zhejiang province, started to teach English at the mountainous primary school two months ago as a volunteer.

"The children always told me that they were hungry, which made me very sad," she told China Daily in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

The primary school was part of a pilot project initiated by the central government, which subsidizes each student from the remote and poor region with 3 yuan (48 US cents) for a nutritious lunch.

But Liang said she believed the cost of each child's lunch was less than 2 yuan.

Her evaluation was echoed by a news report in Yangcheng Evening News, which said the bread and milk were sold at 0.3 yuan and 1.6 yuan in the local shops.

"One boy begged me for a piece of bread on an afternoon after lunch, saying that he was still hungry," she said. "I would have liked to have given it to him, but I could not because there were only three pieces of bread but dozens of hungry students in the classroom."

The students were supplied with seven cases of expired milk in November, Liang said, adding that she reported the incident to the county's education bureau but was ignored.

A school colleague of Liang, surnamed Wang, said that most of the 114 students in the school are from poor families whose parents are migrant workers in remote cities, and the children were left to their grandparents in the village.

"Most of the students' grandparents are illiterate, and they simply think it's a good thing that the children could have free lunches," Wang said.

Deng Fei, a renowned micro-blogger and also the initiator of a charity project that offers free lunches to rural schoolchildren, said that the government's fund for children's lunches used to be embezzled in many places.

"It will be good enough if the students could get 2 yuan of lunch from the 3-yuan standard program," he told the news website under People's Daily on Tuesday. "Some people made a profit from that."

Whether the fund subsidized by the government was embezzled remains unclear since the provincial Education Department is still investigating the case, a female official from the general office of the county education bureau said when contacted by China Daily on Monday.

"I don't know anything about the issue, and all of the people in the bureau don't know either," she said. "Don't call me again."

In an effort to improve the lunch of rural students, the central government has subsidized more than 16 billion yuan annually for 26 million students from 680 counties nationwide since October 2011.

Liang, the female teacher, said that teachers in the primary school managed to collect nearly 20,000 yuan in donations from residents, and the money is going to be used to build a kitchen in the school.

"We are going to buy vegetables and cook lunch for the students, and the female teachers will become cooks at noon," she said. "By doing this, we hope the children will not be hungry anymore."

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