Teacher La My Linh - Luong Minh Primary School is one of the most recent teachers in Tuong Duong district who decided to write a resignation letter to the People's Committee, the Department of Internal Affairs and the Department of Education and Training of the district. However, immediately after quitting her job, she applied for a job in another locality and agreed to start over. Before that, she also expressed her wish to transfer but was unsuccessful. However, due to the situation of "husband away from home, children left with elderly grandparents with no one to take care of them", she had to accept to quit her job to be closer to her family.
The decision to resign to work at Thanh My Primary School (Thanh Chuong) by teacher Trinh Thi Tuyet (formerly an IT teacher at Tam Hop Secondary Boarding School for Ethnic Minorities - Tuong Duong) with a salary reduced by half compared to the school she worked at for nearly 6 years, which is located in a border area, is particularly difficult and is a special boarding school so the income is high...
Recalling her resignation letter to move downstream, teacher Tuyet said “it was a last resort”. However, after many times of writing a transfer request and being rejected, she was forced to accept this option: “In my situation at that time, I had no better choice. Because at that time, my mother was seriously ill, suffering from a serious illness. My family had two children, but because my husband worked in Ky Son, the first child, who was 3 years old, had to be sent to his grandparents. Perhaps because of the lack of care from his parents, he was malnourished. I had to bring my second child to school to live with me when he was just a few months old. Every day I went to teach and had to hire a local person to take care of him because he was too young.”
In Que Phong district, there is a special case where both husband and wife wrote resignation letters, that is teacher Le Thi Thu Hien and teacher Nguyen Dinh Trung. Both were English teachers at Cam Muon Secondary School.
Talking about the process of nearly 20 years working in the highlands, Ms. Hien said that she understood all the hardships when having to go to many different schools and locations. When she first started working, each of her teachers' salaries was only 516,000 VND, but had to deduct many additional fees. Sometimes, to rent a car from the school to the district center, it cost 80,000 VND. To save money, every time they wanted to go back to their hometown or go to the center for something, the teachers here often had to walk.
Due to difficult economic conditions, Ms. Hien and her husband opened a grocery store in 2010. Through the process of doing business smoothly, their life became better and their side job became their main job. Busy with both hands, afraid of not being able to ensure the quality of teaching, the couple decided to quit their jobs to return to manage the store. Ms. Hien also said that the decision to quit their jobs was also thought and cried a lot because "We also hesitated a lot, because we spent several years studying pedagogy, then came here to dedicate ourselves to teaching for nearly 20 years, so it was a pity to quit...). A year before quitting, Ms. Hien and her husband also intended to quit teaching, but because the school lacked English teachers, both of them tried to stay to help the school and the students before the school was supplemented with new teachers.
For the past 5 years, the entire Tuong Duong district has had about 50 teachers requesting to transfer to the lowlands, most of whom are transferred to Vinh and are mainly primary school teachers, preschool teachers or teachers of subjects such as English and IT. Among them, many are principals and vice principals of schools. To retain teachers, the district has used measures such as mobilizing and prioritizing transfers to favorable areas, but the number of teachers wishing to be transferred has not decreased. Since last year, facing the situation of many teachers transferring and a shortage of teachers, Tuong Duong district has decided not to agree to transfer without special reasons. However, this solution seems to be ineffective because according to statistics from the district's Department of Internal Affairs, up to now, 37 more teachers have requested to resign to be transferred.
The process of "retaining" teachers in Tuong Duong district, although considered for the education cause of the district, in reality has left many conflicting opinions. Many teachers even said that "transferring teachers is the right of teachers and if not allowed to transfer, it is not in accordance with the regulations". Regarding this issue, Mr. Lo Thanh Nhat - Vice Chairman of Tuong Duong District People's Committee said: Transfer is the need of each individual, but transferring too many teachers will cause the education of the district to "break down"...
The issue of transferring teachers from the lowlands has also been a concern of Ky Son district for many years to ensure that it is both “reasonable and appropriate”. That is why for many consecutive years, Ky Son district has surveyed and asked teachers to write applications wishing to transfer. However, due to the situation of too many teachers returning, from the last school year until now, Ky Son district has not conducted a survey and has only signed transfer decisions for teachers who have received decisions from other localities.
Many opinions also say that, in order for teachers to be stable and feel secure in their work, in the long term, localities need to have a plan to train on-site and recruit local teachers. However, this plan at this time is difficult to be suitable because there has not been a full survey of the teaching staff and there is no mechanism to encourage or have a policy to attract local teachers to teach locally. Therefore, if not done skillfully or without fundamental calculations, it is easy to have a surplus of students recruited in mountainous districts like in previous years.
The new school year is approaching, but teacher Tran Huu Truong - Doc May Primary School (Ky Son) is still not assured because the school has 3 separate locations, 14 classes but up to this point the school only has 13 teachers. The number of teachers is not enough to be homeroom teachers, let alone enough to teach classes according to regulations. This abnormality started in the middle of the previous school year because at the same time the school had 5 teachers requesting to transfer to the lowlands. Meanwhile, recruiting official teachers (not to mention contract teachers) here is impossible because there is no recruitment source and many teachers are afraid when mentioning Doc May - one of the schools located in the border area, the most difficult and remote area of Ky Son district, with 100% of students being Mong ethnic people.
According to statistics, Ky Son district is currently lacking 44 preschool teachers, 56 primary school teachers and there is a shortage of secondary school teachers. In particular, English and IT are in great shortage because the district has 33 primary schools but only 14 English teachers and 4 IT teachers. At the secondary school level, the district has 19 schools but only 4 IT teachers. Mr. Phan Van Thiet - Head of the Department of Education and Training of Ky Son district said: In order to implement the new general education program, Ky Son district has recently merged schools, brought students from remote locations to the main school, organized primary and secondary boarding schools with the hope that students who study in a concentrated manner will have the opportunity to learn English and IT. But with this reality, we do not know where to find teachers to teach students.
The shortage of teachers also occurs in Que Phong district, especially in specific subjects. The difficulty seems to have doubled, when in the past few years, at least 6 foreign language teachers have applied to transfer to the lowlands. Speaking more about this, teacher Nguyen Duc Toan - Deputy Head of the Education Department of Que Phong district regretted: Now, many localities in the lowlands have a need to recruit foreign language teachers and primary school teachers with many attractive policies. Every time a teacher leaves, the school and the education sector are completely "empty", weak and lacking... We also really want to keep them, but this is the legitimate wish of the teachers, we want to keep them but we cannot.
According to the synthesis of the Department of Education and Training of Que Phong, up to now, the district's teaching staff is not enough to meet the demand. In particular, English teachers are lacking at both primary and secondary levels. Primary school IT teachers are also seriously lacking and the Department has a plan to send them for training according to the Department's requirements, but they have not been able to attend school yet. In this situation, in the 2023-2024 school year, the temporary, immediate solution is for secondary school IT teachers to teach primary school IT lessons. English teachers are encouraged to teach overtime... This difficulty is also unknown when it will be resolved because each time the district prioritizes recruiting 5-6 English teacher quotas, there are only 1-2 applications and there are not enough people recruited. The district has even announced recruitment widely, contacted the Training Department of Vinh University to ask for a list of foreign language pedagogy graduates, and called each student to see if they want to work in Que Phong or not. However, the efficiency is still not high, students do not have the desire to work locally.
A similar situation also occurred in Quy Chau district when from last year until now, the district has had 3 English teachers requesting to transfer to the South or the South (one to Vinh, one to the South) and all are long-time teachers with a lot of experience in teaching. Ms. Nguyen Thi Binh - Deputy Head of the District Education and Training Department said: Due to the lack of teachers, last year we had to send secondary school teachers to teach primary school teachers, and did not assign homeroom teachers for English teachers so that teachers could increase their teaching hours. This year, the curriculum is difficult because all third graders have to study two compulsory subjects, English and Information Technology, and there is a shortage of teachers so we do not know how to calculate. For primary school alone, we need 35 English teachers to cover all schools, but we only have 18 teachers.
Faced with the above reality, recently, the Department of Education and Training of Quy Chau district has also urgently coordinated with the Department of Internal Affairs to recruit teachers, but the difficulty is that there are no teachers to recruit. Previously, in 2021, the district set a target of recruiting 8 English teachers but only 3 applications were submitted...