▲ Haman Nursery Association / President Bae Moon-sook

(PowerKorea) According to experts, early childhood is the decisive period of brain development. Environment and education therefore play a great role in forming their personality and it is adult’s responsibility to provide attention to detail care. 

“Daycare policy in South Korea is well on its way to public but welfare still needs a lot of work in terms of universality. Free education certainly has taken off the financial burden from parents but the expenses in labor cost and operation of private nurseries is rather neglected. In other words, child care benefit is calculated way under the standard operation cost. Relatively small nurseries, for example, spend more than 75% operation budget to the labor and it affects badly to the overall operation of the business” points out Bae Moon-sook, president of the Haman Nursery Association.

Bae has run a nursery in Chilwon-myeon, Haman for more than 20 years. 89 children have now dropped to half. The newly introduced government policy and system has made the administration transparent but the system works rather negatively when it comes to increase of labor cost every year according to Bae.

“Free education is good but if we look into the details of the government support, it is focusing on parents while private nurseries were put aside. After spending 70% budget to the labor, the remaining 30% goes to overhead expenses such as running a school bus etc. As a result, I have worked for nothing because nothing is left at the end of nearly every month.”

In fact, more than 10 nurseries have closed business for the last one year in the county. Public nursery teachers are paid by the government but private nursery teachers are not. Worse still, private nurseries are not allowed to raise nursery fee on their own without government’s approval. As a solution, Bae points out the standardized nursery fee that can be rational for private nursery operators.

Nevertheless, as the president of the Haman Nursery Association, Bae says, she will keep working hard to rear children healthy and sound and to bring a better working condition to private nursery teachers. 

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