Yangzhou School District

We were up very early today to catch a flight to Yangzhou (Yang-zoo), it was a 2.5 hour flight. Yangzhou is a city in eastern China with a population of over 4.5 million.  Please see the link for Yangzhou below

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangzhou

As we left Chengdu and were in the air, it really gave me a great perspective of why Chengdu is called the new area as I was able to get a good view of the hundreds of high rise buildings being built. The Tianfu New Area (which is the name of the school district) in Chengdu will be a sister school district to Northland Pines. To give you an idea of how big this district is, they are in planning phases of building 25 new schools and 25 more to immediately follow for phase two, and the third phase is an additional 50 schools!

The associate director was in attendance and once again was very impressed with our school district and our great relationship with China. They are very envious of what we have at Northland Pines. We spent about two hours talking about global education.  I felt a little out of place when I was describing the size of our district and our 1,350 students. The Yangzhou school district has 624,574 students, 689 schools and 45,942 teachers.  Now that is a big district; however, they were very impressed with the things we are doing at Pines.

After our meeting, we went on a tour of a High School Affiliated with Yangzhou University. This high school has 2,500 students and is the second rated high school in Yangzhou.  The student day here is 7:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Yes that's correct! Many students stay until 9 p.m. to study and some students spend the night in the school dorm.  The school serves three meals a day; breakfast, lunch and dinner. After the tour we met with the staff and administration.

Yes, it was a great day and we really enjoyed seeing this incredible school district.