With large swaths of northern Vietnam still suffering from the deep freeze that appeared late last month, Hanoian parents and educators are butting heads over whether to send their kids to school on cold-weather days.
In recent weeks, educators have sent students home when temperatures fell below 10 degrees Celsius, according to VietnamNet. Deputy director of Hanoi's Department of Education Nguyen Hiep Thong argued that the particularly frigid temperatures in the capital posed a threat to the city's young learners.
“Protecting children’s health should be the top priority,” Thong told the news outlet.
Parents, however, are not having it.
“Children need to understand that everyone has to work, even on cold days, and people have to overcome difficulties to fulfill their work,” office worker Hoang Ky Han told VietnamNet.
For most parents, the main complaints involve finding child care. Hai Yen, a mother in Hanoi, wound up having to bring her four-year-old son to work with her after his classes were cancelled for the day.
“It is funny. Instead of going to school where my son can is taken care of [by] teachers, he has to go to the office where he sits idle and plays with his toys all day,” the mother told VietnamNet.
In Hanoi, parents argue, most facilities have the resources to care for students even in cold temperatures. The greater concern is perhaps further afield, where both children and parents in the country's northernmost provinces are ill-equipped to handle the prolonged cold spell, never mind the citizens of north-central Nghe An province, where the first-ever recorded snowfall took place last week.
At least Hanoians are getting creative in their cold-weather fashion until the deep freeze lifts.
[Photos via Zing]
