These meals provide the energy for children in mountainous areas to go to school.

For students in mountainous areas, due to the rugged terrain and difficult economic conditions, the journey to school is fraught with challenges. To bring knowledge to these remote villages, the authorities of Yen Bai province pay special attention to education in mountainous and disadvantaged areas, implementing many humane policies to support students, especially boarding students in highland schools, so that they have the opportunity to attend school. As a result, the highland districts have maintained student attendance and improved the quality of education in ethnic boarding schools.

Yen Bai has implemented many humane policies to support students, especially providing meals for boarding students in schools in the two mountainous districts.

At Ban Cong Ethnic Boarding Primary and Secondary School in Tram Tau District, 100% of the students are children of the Mong ethnic minority from 5 villages in Ban Cong commune. The furthest village is nearly 20 kilometers from the school, so the subsidized lunch and boarding meals at the school have made it convenient for the students, reducing travel time and allowing them to rest at school, helping them to have better health for studying.

Mua Thi Giang, a 7th-grade student at Ban Cong Ethnic Boarding Primary and Secondary School in Tram Tau district, shared: “Lunch at school has many dishes, like chicken, ham, or pork. Eating lunch at school tastes much better than eating at home. I really enjoy going to school and eating lunch there.”

When lunchtime arrived, the students were very excited and happily ate all of their meals.

Ban Cong Ethnic Boarding Primary and Secondary School has 665 students. Nearly 100 of them receive subsidized lunch meals under Resolution 38 of the Yen Bai Provincial People's Council. This resolution stipulates several policies to support the development of education and training in Yen Bai province from the 2023-2024 school year to the end of the 2025-2026 school year. Specifically, it provides subsidized lunch meals for students attending two sessions per day at ethnic boarding schools who do not yet meet the eligibility criteria under Government Decree No. 116.

Ms. Ha Thi Thanh Son, Principal of Ban Cong Ethnic Boarding Primary and Secondary School, said: "Thanks to the policy supporting students, the school's attendance rate has increased. We feel that the support policy for students is very practical and reasonable; when students attend school regularly, the quality of education at the school has improved."

In previous years, the attendance rate at Phinh Ho Ethnic Boarding Primary and Secondary School was only about 80%. However, since Resolution No. 38 providing lunch subsidies for students, this rate has increased to over 98%. Currently, the school has 424 students, of whom 231 receive boarding benefits under Government Decree 116, and over 200 receive benefits under Resolution 38 of the Provincial People's Council.

Mr. Nguyen Duy Tien, Principal of Phinh Ho Ethnic Boarding Primary and Secondary School, said: "Since the province's support policy was implemented, the school attendance rate has increased significantly, consistently exceeding 98%. In particular, the number of students who attend school in the morning, then go home for lunch and rest in the afternoon has disappeared."

Thanks to the provision of subsidized lunches, the attendance rates of schools in mountainous areas have all improved.

In the 2023-2024 school year, over 1,300 students in Tram Tau district benefited from the policy under Resolution 38, with a total budget of nearly 800 million VND, including 940 primary school students and 379 secondary school students.

It is evident that the policy of providing centralized lunch subsidies for students attending two sessions per day, as stipulated in Resolution 38 of the Yen Bai Provincial People's Council, is a practical and humane initiative that creates fairness and helps ethnic minority students, children from poor households, and those with particularly difficult circumstances to have better learning opportunities. This will create a strong transformation in improving the quality of education in mountainous areas, contributing to reducing the gap in educational quality between disadvantaged and more prosperous regions, and moving towards sustainable educational development in mountainous areas.

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