BaiDe goes to school!
When Half the Sky opened a Children’s Center at the Zhengzhou Children’s Welfare Institution last year, our Youth Services staff was impressed with the academic potential of a teenage boy named BaiDe.
BaiDe had arrived at the institution at the age of 11 and received no schooling at all, until, after a year, the institution’s special education teacher succeeded in getting him into her class. BaiDe’s special education teacher, Zhang YingHua, agreed that he should be in more challenging classes and also agreed to become Half the Sky’s Youth Services mentor in Zhengzhou.
But despite Zhang YingHua’s persistent efforts, local schools refused to admit BaiDe citing a number of reasons: BaiDe, who is confined to a wheel chair because his lower limbs are paralyzed, could not care for his own physical needs; BaiDe did not have any experience in school; BaiDe would likely be bullied by other students.
Finally Zhang YingHua enlisted the help of the institution’s director, who invited representatives from the education bureau, the village committee, and the school to a meeting to discuss BaiDe’s case. After the director informed the group that Half the Sky was willing to hire a paraprofessional to escort BaiDe to school, take care of his physical needs, and protect him if necessary, he was accepted into the local school.
Now 15-year-old BaiDe is thriving:
Dear Uncles, Aunts and Sisters from Half the Sky Foundation,
Thank for all your wonderful help. It makes me extremely happy to go to school with the children outside the institution. The teachers and children at my school are all very good to me. What’s more, I have become the monitor for my class and I also achieved the highest grades in the class.
The best thing I’ve encountered at school is that I have been chosen to represent my class to take part in a Chinese contest. The hardest thing is that I have some problem at my PE class due large part to my physical disabilities.
Bai De
BaiDe’s exemplary grades and behavior have demolished stereotypes about institutionalized children -- school administrators say that while they used to believe that children from the welfare institution would only cause trouble, they now know that those beliefs were inaccurate.
As for Zhang Yinhua, she says getting BaiDe into school and helping him grow from a child who was confined to the institution, did not know how to behave in a classroom, knew only twenty Chinese characters and almost no math, into an exemplary student well-liked by school administrators and his peers was an up and down, exhausting process: “Sometimes I ask myself where I got the courage and patience to go on.” But in the end, it was also an incredibly rewarding and miraculous process: “We helped bring a child out of the institution’s little patch of sky into the big sky of the outside world so he can live a more colorful, fuller life.”