The Tainan City Government has been proactively securing funding from the Ministry of Education to establish publicly-funded kindergartens, reflecting an ongoing commitment to expanding affordable early childhood education services and relieving families of financial burdens. Five new kindergartens have completed construction and will begin to accept students in the 2025 school year. The city is dedicated to providing a safe, healthy, and creative learning environment for the next generation of Tainan.
Tainan Mayor Huang Wei-che thanked the Ministry of Education for demonstrating its strong support by subsidizing over NTD 430 million to the city. The budget was used to build four public kindergartens and one non-profit kindergarten, a multi-year project initiated in 2020. Now, five years later, the new kindergartens have officially opened, realizing the policy, “The Nation Will Support Child-rearing of Children Under Six Years Old”, proposed by President Lai Ching-te. Huang pointed out that when President Lai served as the Mayor of Tainan, Lai was the first to create the concept of non-profit, public, and quasi-public kindergartens and later promoted it as a nationwide policy when he was the Premier, rapidly increasing the hardware and software for early childhood education.
The five new kindergartens - Jiangjun Kindergarten, Hong Ren Anping Non-profit Kindergarten, and the affiliated kindergartens of Sishu Elementary School, Jiaba Elementary School, and Sing-gong Elementary School - all incorporate local cultural features into their designs, Mayor Huang explained. Taking a child-centered approach to learning, the new kindergartens offer an environment that combines environmental education, multicultural elements, and community resources. Lastly, the Mayor emphasized that the city continues to work with the central government to provide more affordable and high-quality early childhood education environments so that parents do not have to worry about their children’s education.
According to Tainan’s Bureau of Education, this set of new kindergartens adds 11 classes for children aged 3 to 5 and 7 classes for 2-year-olds, alongside 376 new positions for preschool educators. The Bureau reiterated its commitment to keep on enhancing kindergarten hardware and increase the number of professional educators to provide affordable and high-quality early childhood education to its citizens. Tainan strives to become an education city where children thrive, parents enjoy peace of mind, and teachers continue to develop professionally.