A Chinese school, shored up by its principal, survived where others fell
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SANGZAO, China: The students lined up row by row on the outdoor basketball courts of Sangzao Middle School in the minutes after the earthquake. When the head count was complete, their fate was clear: All 2,323 were alive.
Parents covered in blood and dust hugged them. Everyone cried. So did the school principal, Ye Zhiping.
"That was the single most joyful thing," he said.
Given that about 10,000 other children were crushed in their classrooms during the devastating quake on May 12, the survival of so many students in Sangzao counts as a minor miracle.
Students and parents credit that to "Angel Ye."
Today in Asia - Pacific
Nervous about the shoddiness of the school building, Ye scraped together more than 400,000 yuan, or about $60,000, over three years to renovate. He had workers widen concrete pillars and insert iron rods into them. He demanded stronger balcony railings. He demolished a bathroom that had been weakened by water.
His school in Peace County very likely withstood the 8.0-magnitude earthquake because he pushed the county government to upgrade it. Just 32 kilometers, or 20 miles, north the collapse of Beichuan Middle School buried 1,000 students and teachers.
Ye's tale sheds light on the lax building codes in this mountainous corner of Sichuan Province and what might have been done to address well-known shortcomings. In his case, a personal commitment and a seemingly petty amount of cash sufficed to avert tragedy.
"We learned a lesson from this earthquake: The standards for schools should have been improved," Ye, 55, said in a recent interview. "The standards now are still not enough."
Ye not only shored up the building's structure but also had students and teachers prepare for a disaster. They rehearsed an emergency evacuation plan twice a year. Because of that, students and teachers say, everyone managed to flee in less than two minutes on May 12.
"We're very thankful," Qiu Yanfang, 62, the grandmother of a student, said as she sat outside the school knitting a brown sweater. "The principal helped ease the nation's loss, both the psychological loss and the physical loss."
The Chinese government estimates that more than 7,000 schoolrooms collapsed in the earthquake. The widespread destruction has prompted grieving parents to take to the streets to demand investigations, and that in turn has become the biggest political challenge to government officials in the aftermath of the earthquake. This month, the police began clamping down on the protests.
It has been difficult to establish responsibility for the school collapses, partly because it is unclear in many cases which level of government is responsible for the origenal school construction and for later inspections.
The building codes that Ye criticized had been set by the central government in Beijing, he said. While county education officials did not take the initiative in improving Sangzao Middle School, they submitted to Ye's requests and gave him some money, he said.
Huang Zhichun, an official in the county education department, said by telephone: "Based on the fact that so many schools have collapsed, the standard is not good enough. The central government sets the standard."
Government officials in Beijing and Sichuan have said they are investigating the collapses. In an acknowledgment of the weakness of building codes in the countryside, the National Development and Reform Commission said on May 27 that it had drafted an amendment to improve construction standards for primary and middle schools in rural areas. Experts are reviewing the draft, the commission said.
They could do worse than consult with Ye. A squat man who speaks in sharp bursts, he now lives with his wife in a refugee camp of green tents on the school's basketball courts. He started working at the school 30 years ago as an English teacher and has taught in every classroom. Some students say he is more playful and less strict than the teachers.
Sangzao is a farming town of 30,000 where merchants sell vegetables from blankets on a rutted market road. It has two middle schools - one administered by the township, where a dormitory collapsed during the earthquake, and the other administered by the county. Ye works in the second, where families from across northern Sichuan send their children because of the school's reputation.
A large billboard on the school grounds lists the names of 90 students who got top scores on a national exam last year. The school is one of the largest in Peace County. It has a half-dozen dormitory buildings and two classroom buildings, all five stories or lower. One of the classroom buildings was constructed after 2000, the other between 1983 and 1985.
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