Pengcheng Special Education School: profile of compassion

A female student raises her right hand to salute school principal Han Rufen,Sept 18, 2014. [Photo by Chen Bei/chinadaily.com.cn]

Yet Pengcheng Special Education School has yet to receive any of the subsidies, according to Han Rufen, the school's 83-year-old principal.

"The sum of subsidies is now mainly allocated to public special schools because they receive students free of charge", explained a local educational official on the condition of anonymity.

The result is that Pengcheng, and other private facilities like it, are left to raise revenue and ask for donations in order to provide services.

"This school would not have been expanded to its current scale of more than 130 students, if we had received no government support or contributions from numerous charity organizations, private enterprises as well as individuals," according Chin-Huang, who serves as the school's honorary principal.

Pengcheng School's Past

The school's history starts almost 30 years ago with Han and her intellectually disabled grandson.

In 1987, Han had difficulties in getting the six-year-old boy into ant education facility. No regular schools were willing to accept a student with an IQ score of 39, much lower than the internationally regarded functional range of 70 to 130. The only local public special education school was restricted to hearing-impaired students.

The retired middle school teacher, then 56, decided to take matters into her own hands and began enrolling in special education teaching courses.

Two years later, she founded a school with three teachers and recruited the first class of five students, including her grandson.

It's been a hard stretch for special education in Xuzhou overt the past decades, according to Han, but there has been some recent improvement. The city has added four more public special education schools, all of them funded by the government.

Help also arrived in 2001, when Chin-Huang became involved in Han's desperate search for a new site when the previous school complex was set for demolition.

The new 1,140-square-meter site where the Pengcheng Special Education School stands today was granted by local education bureau in 2002.

Construction of the schoolhouses was completed in 2004, thanks to global construction equipment maker Caterpillar and the Hoglund Foundation – the school's biggest donors in recent years – as well as donations collected by UNESCO.

"Doreen's outreach to corporations and charity organizations has made a huge difference in building and developing this private school through the years," said Karin Malmstrom, director of Cotton Council International (China).