Hard lessons for Beijing migrant worker children

By Tyra Dempster

BEIJING (Reuters) - For Yao Wenli, Beijing Mingyuan School's dank classrooms are an improvement on the four previous schools she has been to since her parents left their home-town to look for better work.

"The surroundings here are much better and the playground is bigger," the 11-year-old from China's poor southern province of Jiangxi said breezily.

Mingyuan's several hundred students are all like Yao, children of parents who have moved from their home villages to scrape a living in the Olympic host city.

Beijing's 40 billion yuan facelift for the Games has drawn millions of migrant workers, many of whom have helped build showcase Olympic venues, subway lines and highways.

Their arrival has also sparked fears of slums developing on the city's fringes, and a mounting social crisis as the city strains to house and provide health-care for their children.

Crumbling and starved of government funding, schools like Mingyuan, which lies 40 minutes away from the Forbidden City in a shabby northern suburb, take up part of the education shortfall.

"I want the government to support and help this migrant workers' school through policy," said Zhang Shujun, Mingyuan's principal.

"We need the government to give us a grant to pay for the playground, sports equipment and repairs and to pay for better quality teachers and classrooms, we need government assistance," said Zhang.