Piggy Bank for Happiness - Give Your Love for the Future of the Kids
To continuously care for disadvantaged children, the Ministry of Education specially planned the "Edusave Account Program". Schools open special accounts and send the needs of individual cases online through the Piggy Bank for Happiness - Give Your Love for the Future of the Kids www.edusave.edu.tw. The information on this website is open to the public and interested contributors may make their donations to their specified persons. The donations and the purposes specified will be published on the Internet, so the contributors can make donations easily and without worry.
Minister of Education, Tu Cheng-Sheng, called on the attention of the charitable persons and foundations during the website press conference on December 31 to do more to help children in need. This website was officially launched on January 1 of 2008, and so far a total of 2114 public secondary and elementary schools have been approved by the Ministry of the Interior for the first wave of charity fundraising. In the future, more public secondary and elementary schools will join the program and the love from the public will be a beacon of hope for the children.
To practically implement the education policy of "Social Care" and assist disadvantaged students, the Ministry of Education has begun studying the feasibility of the "Edusave Account Program", which is constituted by savings accounts based in schools that are used to help these disadvantaged students. Ideally, the program is targeted at disadvantaged secondary and elementary school students for care of the minorities in the society, but in practice, we wish to join forces with the Ministry of Education, nongovernmental organizations, the public, and the local governments to help economically disadvantaged students to complete their education.
This program is targeted at the students of public vocational high schools and high schools (including the high school and junior high school sections of the public secondary school system) and public junior high/elementary schools, who are classified as being from: low-income families, mid/low income families, and families that encounter sudden difficulties which results in their children being unable to complete their education. For special cases outwith the above three categories, the Ministry of Education will also allocate NT$20 to 60,000 of the charity funds for each school; a total of NT$200 million is expected to be invested in the schools participating in this program.
Most students who need emergency aid have suffered sudden unforeseen events in the family. Some families are widely covered by the media and begin to "attract" donations. Through the Edusave Accounts, the needed amount can be specified, so the same amount of the donation will help more people in need and make the charity go further. This mechanism will help the contributors make donations to the right person at the right time, so that students in remote, disadvantaged, or poor areas will be able to receive the social resources in time.
The Edusave Program aims to help students who are encounter sudden family difficulties, so this program will not affect the subsidies for school tuition and fees, and lunch fees. In the future, the Ministry of Education will continue to raise funds to help disadvantaged students. We hope that, through the Edusave Account Website, the charities from the society will help the students in need and give them equal opportunities to complete their education.